ADAM

 

Friday January 10 - 2220 PST

Five days until Turbocharger activates

 

Doing a slow circle of the hallway I got a general idea of the source of the green light on my sparkler. There was shielding around the sparkler to keep outside sources from contaminating the reading. Outside sources meaning me and the way I made sparklers glow blue. To be sure it wasn't my night vision coloring it green I flipped up my goggles. Sure enough my sparkler was still green.

That was bad.

Green meant it was Category 4. Really big. In the dark with my goggles folded up over my helmet I wasn't sure exactly where it was coming from. But I could hear rapid fire gunshots and lots of screaming coming from elsewhere on my floor. In the middle of all the panicked footfalls was some stomping. And it wasn't stomping from people feet, but something much larger. Like someone released a bull in the next room and it was running around angry knocking over furniture.

The sparkler turned yellow when I faced all the commotion. That was good and bad. Good in the sense that yellow was only Category 3 and less scary than green. Bad because it meant there was more than one exo on the loose.

With exos on either side of me and a direct order to stay put my options seemed pretty clear. Stay in this hallway and wait for Grider and his men to find me.

The screaming was getting louder and at least one of the screamers was suddenly cut off. That yellow exo must have caught one of them.

That was enough for me. Grider could chew me out later if he wanted. But those people were in trouble right now. As much as it terrified me to face down another transdimensional monstrosity—like the spider-crab from the warehouse—I couldn't just sit there and listen to a bunch of people get slaughtered one by one.

I took off down the darkened hallway toward the worst of the shrieking and I made it about halfway before I realized I was practically blind with my goggles flipped up. But as I reached up I caught an odd purple light coming from under a door to my right. It was dim and barely visible through the seam between the door's bottom and the floor. I probably would have missed it with the tunnel vision effect that my night vision goggles gave me had they been down.

Now my curiosity got the best of me. That odd dancing light flickered like it was coming from a candle. Only it was an unnatural violet glow instead. And it was coming from the room where my sparkler indicated the Category 4.

I got down on a knee and then tried to get low enough to peer through the gap, but it was so tight I couldn't see more than a couple inches inside. There were some voices speaking in hurried tones. I didn't understand what they were saying but they were humans at least and they sounded scared.

My hand went for the door knob, but before it got there I heard a tremendous crash from down the hallway. The big door down there had just been kicked in and the kicker had rushed through without even waiting for the door to open all the way.

I flipped my goggles down in time to see the guy twirl around and raise a small gun, not at me but through the door he just burst through. It looked like an AK-47 but with a really short barrel and handguard. He held it in front of his face like he was holding a camera and about to take a picture. Then he let off a long burst of fire at whatever he was running away from.

In the narrow hallway it was thunderous. Even with hearing protection on it left my ears ringing.

Apparently, a burst of machine gun fire didn't stop whatever was hunting him. He turned and ran straight down the hallway towards me. When his flashlight hit me his eyes went even wider than they had been when he thought there was only a threat behind him. I didn't need to be a mind reader to know what he was thinking. The way his short barreled AK came up for a hasty on-the-run shot told me everything I needed to know about his intentions.

Unfortunately for him I'd already taken aim with Dominus. Just like I'd practiced back at Danger Drive I sighted in through the reflex sight (turned up extra bright so I could see it through my goggles), exhaled, and caressed the trigger until it broke cleanly.

BOOM!

Dominus belched forth an eight hundred grain lump of copper jacketed lead at almost three thousand feet per second. That round then sailed through the gunman's center of mass taking about half of his chest with it.

He continued forward a step and then plowed into an expensive rug like a marathon runner overcome with exhaustion. His mini-rifle and flashlight bounced along the floor before coming to rest under a side table with the light pointing back at the body.

The guy was definitely dead. I say that not because he stopped moving but because he was missing a chunk of his torso about the size of a basketball. It looked like it had just been scooped out by some humongous spoon.

I didn't realize that Dominus did that to people. All this time I sort of assumed it would just poke a hole through a body and keep going. Not take half of the body with it.

But it wasn't just that this horrific damage had been done to a human body that caught my attention. It was the fact that I was behind it. Before that moment I had never actually killed a human being before.

Sure I'd trained for it, and I killed all kinds of bad things like alien beasts, zombies, and a demon god. And no I don't count that wizard possessed by the demon god, he was a goner already. But this was different. This was just a regular guy.

Granted he was about to shoot me, so I didn't feel guilty about it. But it was just…I don't know…different.

I wasn't sure how long I just sat there staring at the body, lost in thought. But I saw something at the end of the hall. It wasn't a person, just movement. In the dim greenness of night vision it was hard to make out what was going on down there. All I saw was a wavy movement in the air, like a mirage, backlit by the moonlight coming in through the window behind it.

Flipping up my goggles helped a little bit. The flashlight was still shining and I could see the outline of a vaguely humanoid form. In the middle of it was a floating broom handle.

I blinked twice, because none of it made sense. Was this some phantom janitor coming to sweep the floors?

As it came closer I began to see it wasn't the handle of the broom. There was a long blade at the end that curved downward towards a cruel point. That blade was covered in a dark oily goo that seemed to ripple with life. And the phantom was coming toward me.

It wasn't in any kind of a hurry though. Slowly, it floated towards me at a crawling pace. As though it wasn't worried that I would get away. The thing knew in its mind that it had me.

Dominus came up and sighted in on its center of…well, it didn't have a center of mass. It was more like a dark cloud of billowy ash.

Then the lock on the door to my right clicked and it swung open. General Basser stuck his head out at me. "Adam? Is that you? Are you here to rescue us? Is Captain Gri—"

I didn't have time to answer him. There was a cloud monster with a scythe coming at me. Dominus belched fury twice in succession.

BOOM! BOOM!

And both rounds sailed through billowy puffs of darkened air as if they weren't even there. I was in trouble now. This thing was Dominus-proof.

One of my simple rules for survival is this: If something is immune to fifty caliber rounds you go the other way.

I shoved Basser out of the way and slammed the door shut behind me. For the moment I was safe. But I needed to come up with a new strategy. And in the meantime hope the shadow monster couldn't come through a locked door. At least I hoped it couldn't.