Until Dawn
When Gerald Cummings left the realm of humanity for the feral incarnation of his affliction, there had been no signal that could have been detected by the machines of the scientists, yet the mind of Walter Taylor had been touched; Walter had been deeply asleep at the moment of the change, but something had reached out and shocked him awake as if an electrical current had been fed into his brain.
It was time at last.
His sister was asleep in a room which adjoined his (the room had been provided by the Institute because it was clear that Dorothy was the one person who could come close to controlling Walter), but she had received no psychic warning of the presence of the awful danger that had flared into life inside the building. Walter knew that her loving interference in the approaching confrontation could only hinder his performance, so he very quietly left the bed and dressed in the pants he had worn to the compound; this was enough clothing for the task that faced him.
Though he remained shoeless for the balance and agility that this would provide him and bare-chested for upper-body speed and freedom, Walter knew that he could not presume to enter into mortal combat with this thing without a weapon. Eaglesbreath was on the Otherside, where it would remain forever, and he doubted that any weapon so civilized as a strong sword could be found in this weak place, so his only ally would be found in improvisation.
In the small, spare room which he had been sleeping, there was no furniture other than the bed, one chair, and a surprisingly heavy table upon which a lot of diagnostic equipment sat. Carefully removing the machinery, Walter turned the table over and began to press his massive arms into the task of wrenching loose one of the thick legs, an operation which didn’t take very long but which caused an unfortunate amount of strident noise.
He stood from the floor and held the metal leg before him with an ease that masked the intricate weighing and testing in which he was engaged; it was slim at the bottom, which would have been the hilt in a proper sword, but his strong hand found a good grip without difficulty; and the business end, where it had joined the table, flared out to the width of his two fists, with a jagged rim of razor-like metal.
It was not really appropriate, but it would do. It would have to do.
As he had expected, the noise awoke the Girl, and she rushed into the room just as he was about to offer his most sacred prayer.
“Walter, oh good grief! What have you done now?” she asked wearily upon seeing the overturned table. “Why don’t you please go back to bed and get some sleep?” She knew nothing of the horror which was unfolding on the other side of the building.
“Leave me, child,” he said quietly. He was not at all surprised to find his order ignored: she was as strong-headed as all of the young women who lived on the Otherside put together. “Then remain still while I offer my invocation,” he told her, more firmly, as he dropped to one knee with his right fist pressed to his forehead. This was the most holy time conceivable to Walter Bearsarm, the moment before a great battle when a warrior commended his life and his afterlife to the greatest power in all the Universe, the god who had always been and would be forever, the god who had inseminated life into the dead, barren world, the All Father, Odin.
Following this sacred ritual, he was ready and eager to face whatever awaited him in these manmade caverns, but the Girl refused to see that her place remained behind him, in safety, and she trailed after him with her pleas and negligible physical interference. Did she not understand that it was for her that he went into the battle?
They were halfway around the building, nearing the creature’s immediate vicinity, when the piercing alarm bell went off and frightened the Girl into near hysteria. Walter could also tell that the beast was shocked by the noise, even though he had never laid eyes upon the thing, so he allowed himself to be dragged by the Girl and her terror into another room along with many other people who had been walking or running in the corridor when the alarm sounded. He had, he knew, until morning to make the meeting with the demon, so he could permit this short amount of time for it to gather its inner forces while he set himself about neutralizing the drug which still circulated in his bloodstream and gave louder voice to his friends on the Otherside.
Surrounded by shocked, frightened men and women, most of whom knew not yet what was happening within their formerly safe world, Walter Bearsarm sat silently on the cold and hard floor and reached deeply inside his tremendous body for the strength and courage which would be so soon required of him in the fiercest battle of all time.
This was ecstasy, this was the complete fulfillment of his life and the alien life which lived inside of him. Blood covered the Man in a crusting blanket, and his head trembled with the energy of death. He was glutting himself on the weak, fearful creatures which surrounded him, but there was no lessening of the joy that he felt due to the lack of any formidable resistance. The simple act of ripping into the hot interiors of their bodies was enough to fill his soul with a screaming delight that was almost unendurable in its power.
In the Man’s system, the uncountable millions of bacteria cried individually for more human food, the food that he was devouring as he killed, so he could not have rested from his savagery had he wished to do so. Before, when he came to himself in the vastness of the world’s night, the prey had been difficult to locate, hidden away as it usually was in structures of wood and stone, and often he had been forced to satisfy the wailing devils within by eating the flesh and blood of lower animals. But now he was inside one of those structures—a gigantic one—and they could only hide from him temporarily; they could never escape.
This was the greatest time of his life, and it was far from over, because hundreds of people waited in separate pockets. They huddled in many rooms behind locked doors and hid in terror from the death that he would bring to them. The doors were heavy and hard, but he could force a way through them. He was powerful and far beyond a man now.
Already he had made a nearly complete circle of the huge building.
Long nights had passed through him before with a stabbing, undefined need gnawing and tearing at him, but now he had come across the real treasure, and he would exalt in the bloody glory of his discovery for so very long before the sun came to take him again over the brink of life into nothingness. He would live to the heights and depths that had never before been reached, and when his existence was reborn at regular times throughout eternity, he would recall this night as the zenith of his existence.
The night that the blood had flowed about him like a river.
Even the building itself began shrieking in fear of him.
The shrill alarm had driven like a cold spike through their minds when it began, but at least Morgan and Ferguson were now sure that other people were alive in the building, alive and aware of the danger that enveloped them. They had gone no more than thirty yards along the corridor from the observation room when they saw a small group of men moving just as tentatively as they in the opposite direction. After swallowing his heart and assuring himself that none of the five people he abruptly faced was the insane Cummings, Doug silently raised his hand in greeting. He recognized only a disheveled Blake Corbett among them.
“Are you two okay?” asked the leader of the other group in a cautious voice just loud enough to be heard over the alarm as they approached one another.
“Yeah, I believe so,” Ferguson answered.
“You’re bleeding,” Corbett pointed out to the reporter.
Morgan glanced down to his red, shredded shirt. “I know, but it’s not deep. Where are you going?” The siren suddenly shut off, and he found that the last few words of his “whisper” had been close to a shout.
“Back to the observation room,” Blake said in the intimidating, if relative, silence. “Axton is going to try to stop Cummings here in the corridor with gas or something, and we’re going back to bring in anyone who might still be alive before he floods the hall.”
“Bring them where? And who’s Axton?”
“Dr. Heath Axton,” supplied one of the other men, looking, like the rest, as if he had just experienced his first combat action. “He’s the director of the Center, and his office is about a hundred feet or so back that way. Nearly everybody who escaped the, uh, the attack is in the office being attended to by doctors.”
“They’ve sent people outside to get help, haven’t they?”
The man shook his head. “Not yet; we’re not supposed to leave the facility until he says so.”
“What? Doesn’t he realize what’s going on here?” Morgan demanded. “This is a massacre, and it can only get worse!”
Ferguson had been silent until then, but his friend’s rising voice caused him to push firmly into the group and whisper with equal firmness, “Gentlemen, why don’t we do something constructive like getting the hell out of this open hallway? I’m filled with the uncomfortable sensation of standing exposed in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and, believe me, this ain’t no dream!”
The man who had been the target of Morgan’s interrogation looked grateful for the interruption, and Corbett said, “You’re right. We don’t have much time, and both of you look like you could do with some patching up. Just keep moving this way until you come to the glass-faced office with all of the people inside, and be careful that you don’t stumble into Cummings moving from the other direction.”
Morgan’s pervasive sense of moral obligation activated itself once again. “Listen, Blake, I don’t know if anybody’s still alive back there, but if there are some survivors, you’ll need all of the hands you can—”
“No, Doug,” Corbett interrupted. “We agreed in the office to keep the group small and mobile, because we know that Cummings has got to be on the prowl for more blood, so the best thing you can do is have that chest seen about. It may be worse than you think.”
“I don’t feel right about—”
Ferguson grasped his shoulder and steered him in the direction of the office. “Let’s go before you decide to tie one hand behind your back and tackle that monster with your teeth.”
Morgan allowed himself to be guided away from the other men, who resumed their cautious journey through the deadly corridor. All about them was silent, now that the alarm had been killed, and none of the lab doors that they passed were open. Still, the quiet and emptiness offered no comfort to either of them. It only served to heighten the feeling of walking through an incredibly realistic nightmare (how else could they accept that a human being had been transformed into a savage, powerful, invulnerable creature from mythological hysteria and was literally slaughtering their fellows with a terrible joy?) It was a relief to them when they caught sight of the brightly lighted, glass-fronted office situated between a pair of the innumerable radiant chambers that fronted the laboratories.
While they had been moving through the hall in something close to shock, the lack of sound had aided them in that they would have been aware of an approaching Cummings, but when they left the corridor and squeezed into the office, the noise that inundated them was like a welcome wave from some warm sea. Welcome in spite of the fact that more than half of the sounds were low moans of pain and fear. A young woman carrying a red-stained towel turned toward the door with widely expressive eyes—as did everyone else who heard the pair enter the room—and breathed an audible sigh of relief upon recognizing them as refugees rather than the beast that had created the state of chaos.
“Wow, you certainly gave us a shock!” she explained in a careful tone. “We thought that the animal had found us again. It is still down there in the gallery?” She closed the door and lightly pushed them into the depths of the crowded room.
“No, he went the other way,” Ferguson answered. “Why’s everybody bunched up in here?”
“Protection,” she replied. “Dr. Axton wants us all together and out of the hallway when he orders the gas to be released.”
Morgan didn’t like this total reliance upon a “gas attack” for their salvation. “This is a hell of a place to be holed up against Cummings,” he said. “He’ll come through those windows like they were made of spun sugar!”
“This is the operations center for the entire building,” the woman responded. “Besides, he won’t get a chance to attack us again; just as soon as the men get back from the observation room, the plan will be put into operation. If you’ll move to the rear of this office, there are several doctors who will check you over and take care of your injuries.”
Still uneasy over what they saw as the basic defenselessness of the room, Doug and Brad took her direction and moved to the rear of the long, wide, outer office, with its slickly modern-designed couches and desks, toward a second room that they could see in spite of the crush of frightened, nervous people blocking their way. This second room could be reached through an irradiation chamber like those leading into the labs. Morgan decided, correctly, that this was the control center and that it was constructed with the same backup defense as the labs so that it could be totally isolated from the rest of the facility in case of emergency.
They found the furiously busy doctors and awaited their turns for examination with a shivering man who was pressing his bleeding right ear against his head on one side of them and a short, dark-complexioned woman on the other; the woman was repeating, “Don’t let him come near me, don’t let him touch me again, don’t let him …” in a flat tone. Inside the second room (the doors to which were open), a voice that Morgan had come to know quite well during the preceding months was making itself heard above the low-register buzz of activity.
Dr. Heath Axton, director of the research and diagnostic portion of the Institute, was a tall, distinguished-appearing man with solid white hair. This hairstyle gave him the look of military authority, rather than being an indication of advancing age. His voice was also full of that same authority, even though he was speaking in the midst of the overwhelming events of the past minutes to someone outside the building by telephone:
“No, I cannot give you any further details because this is G.C. confidential, but we don’t have the situation under control at the moment. The gas should give us a measure of safety until dawn. Right now, your only job is to get in touch with Professor Ernest Hyrlasht … that … that’s Hyrlasht, H-y-r-l-a-s-h-t, write it down, of Braedon University in Berlin, West Germany. Phone him at once! Tell him it involves the Cummings affair and that he should take the quickest flight here! Of course, he speaks English! No, you are not to allow him in! No one is to be allowed inside this building until I give the order! Have you got that? We are officially under Red Line Quarantine … absolutely no one in or out!”
Those were the words which triggered the loud response in the voice that Douglas Morgan so swiftly recognized, “What the hell did you just say?”
Axton, apparently unharmed by the werewolf, calmly hung up the telephone and asked, “What is your name, young man?”
“Nicolas Grundel,” Nick answered, dropping both fists onto the other man’s desk in a business-like attitude, “but that’s not as important as the boil on my butt! Did I just hear you quarantine this building!”
“That’s correct.”
“You fool!” the bearded young man exploded. “Don’t you realize what you’ve done? You’ve sealed us inside the building with that monster! We have to get outside help, a net or something to stop him … for Christsake, a bazooka, if nothing else!”
“Please keep your voice down,” Axton said commandingly. “I’ve closed off all exits to insure that Mr. Cummings cannot escape our custody. His affliction is certainly the most astounding condition in the annals of medicine, and since we don’t know where in the building the man is at the moment, it would be impossible to evacuate this facility without opening several avenues of escape for him. I don’t think that the guards in the clearance chamber would be able to stop him, do you?”
“Axton,” Nick began, and, noting the dozens of pairs of panicky eyes trained upon him, he leaned forward to continue in a lower, but no less urgent, voice, “Axton, I doubt if a Sherman tank would stop him, but I just left a room where human bodies were scattered around like meat scraps in a butcher shop, and those poor idiots that you sent out after survivors may well add to that total. Cummings is a maniac who can slaughter us like a wolf among sheep, and not even guns can kill him! I’m no longer interested in capturing him, I simply want to survive him!”
Axton’s ruddy face flushed even deeper. “Listen for a change, kid! I was in the observation room, so you’re not telling me a thing that I’m not already aware of, but I will not allow Cummings to get away from us now to either spread his disease indiscriminately throughout the nation or disappear and deprive us all of the chance to study him! A powerful anesthetic certainly will knock him out.”
“Jesus Christ!” Grundel roared incredulously. “We can’t be certain about anything having to do with this guy! He’s rewriting medical texts by the second! So what do we resort to if your anesthetic doesn’t stop him? Do we sit around refusing to accept the situation while Cummings picks us off at his leisure?”
“Should the circumstances warrant, I believe that we can safely lock ourselves within the various laboratories throughout the building. Each lab has solid metal doors in the irradiation chamber, just as this one does, and they can serve as defensive barriers until dawn, when the danger will pass, presumably. Cummings may be what you claim, but he is still basically a human being. No man could batter his way through one of those doors, much less a pair in each lab.”
Nick threw his hands into the air in melodramatic exasperation.
From behind him, Barry Druitt, the slim, dark-haired governor of California, laid a hand on Grundel’s shoulder and smiled with his most confidence-inspiring campaign smile. “You know, young man, we’re all in this together, and not one of us can afford to give in to our entirely understandable panic, because we might well infect everyone else at this time when we most desperately need to use our wits.”
Nick whirled about with his distaste for politicians in general reddening his face. “Well, Governor, I must say that I’m glad to see that you got out of the gallery unharmed,” he said, as Druitt started to incline his head in modest thanks. Then Grundel angrily added, “I was afraid I might have slowed you down when you stepped on me going through the door!”
Druitt’s face hardened, and the two armed men who had not left his side throughout the madness of the night stepped forward suggestively. The Governor absently calmed them with a wave.
“Yeah,” Grundel laughed, “some honcho cowboys you’ve got buzzing around you. I didn’t see them trying to give those poor dumb cops any help when Cummings ripped them apart.”
“The officers’ actions proved that guns were not effective,” Druitt pointed out coldly. “Now, I advise you to calm down and stay that way until the doctor can get us out of this, or you might find yourself in an enforced silence!”
Grundel could sooner have flown out of the building than allowed that statement to go unchallenged, but before he could answer, Axton stood from behind desk and grasped his arm in a grip that was tight enough to be painful. In a near-hiss, he stated, “The best thing for you to do is find a corner somewhere and stay in it; but no matter what you decide, you will shut your mouth or I shall have you forcibly sedated. And don’t bother to stir up any more trouble among the others, because the federal guards who control this compound have orders not to break a quarantine for an entire calendar month unless I give the order. Until Cummings is captured alive, either in his present form or his natural one, I assure you that I will not give that order.”
Nick stood before the four hostile men, burning in his desire to lash out at them but fighting to keep his vigorous temper under control. He knew that each of them had seen the same horror that he had witnessed, but for differing reasons—whether scientific or personal—they were suicidally committed to catching the monster rather than escaping or destroying it. His scientific curiosity was just as strong as any of theirs, but he knew that he never again wanted to be within a hundred miles of that creature, whether it was itself or Gerald Cummings, alive or dead.
And there was nothing that they would let him do about it.
William Pembroke had no idea of what was going on in the rather distant portions of the building. Having slipped away from the group of reporters and photographers who had camouflaged him at the very beginning of the observation of the homicidal nutcase just before midnight, he found himself wonderfully alone in the endlessly curving hallway and free to choose the targets suitable to his vital mission. There had been two instances in which he had been stopped by suspicious facility security personnel, but both times his legitimate press pass and convincing tale of having accidentally wandered from the rest of the visiting newspeople bluffed him through the confrontations.
His original primary target had been the entrance at the front of the building, where a powerful explosion could breach the supposedly near-perfect line of demarcation between the interior of the post and the world outside (thus graphically displaying the ever-present danger of some genocidal experiment escaping into the open air). After a careful reconnoitering of the area, he had been forced to give up on the site, however, because, with all of the lobbies., conference rooms, lounges, and laboratories located in the huge building, this was the one spot which was relatively “alive” with staff and visitors at that time of night. Pembroke didn’t care how many of the innocent there would be killed in the explosions he planned to set off, but he was worried about his charges being discovered and neutralized before they had an opportunity to do their job.
His second choice turned out to be better in many ways than the first. As a government building subject to particular security measures and open to the general public only rarely under special circumstances, the structure was exempt from the laws requiring a certain number of visible and well-marked exits in case of fire or other emergencies. As a result of this exemption, there was only one way out other than through the front way that Pembroke had been able to find; this way lay almost directly opposite the entrance on the lower curve of the hall/circle apparently facing the hills which reared up behind the fenced-in compound. The door leading to it resembled any of the other numerous storage closets except that above it sat an unilluminated block letter sign saying EXIT.
This sliding door opened to his touch on the wall switch next to it to reveal a spacious room stocked with everything from bed linen to sophisticated recording machinery. What was most interesting to Pembroke, though, was a steep stairwell which descended a good thirty feet before ending at a long, narrow room that was dimly lighted by fluorescent strip bulbs. This second room was packed with large water pipes and electrical conduits.
Pembroke walked all the way to the rear of the lower room before he located a wide metal door in the back wall (it was locked, of course). He wasn’t interested in an escape path, but rather a strategic point for the first of his bombs. This seemed to be ideal, since he felt sure that his plastic explosive could blast through the door and into the night beyond, but he took a moment to consider. He was there to make a point, not to fulfill the ugly prophecy that he was preaching; suppose he set the charge next to the door and it blew a large hole into the outside while another of his presents was ripping through a lab which contained some of those new life forms which so thoroughly terrified him? Wouldn’t such a scenario make it possible that he could become by accident the destroyer of humankind rather than its Cassandra-like savior?
After some minutes of deep thought, he decided not to chance releasing some bacteria without cure into the world and returned to the upper room, the storage area. The devastation of this would be close enough to an actual breach for demonstration purposes. While he removed a portion of plastic explosive from the special belt at his waist and wired it with a small electronic timing device from the interior of his camera, a scene of purest horror beyond his wildest imaginings was taking place some distance away in the observation room which he had deserted. He was too far away to hear the screams. He had completed the first bomb and hidden it among the shelving at the rear of the upper room when the building-wide alarm siren burst upon his ears with a shrieking accusation.
Oh god, he thought, they’ve found out about me somehow!
Well, he had not come this far only to be arrested without accomplishing his mission. Pembroke darted back into the room and removed all of the explosive from his belt, hurriedly pressing it into the charge that had already been prepared. It wouldn’t be as he had planned—-a simultaneous series of blasts erupting at several spots throughout the building—, but it would be one hell of a destructive, beautiful statement.
The siren suddenly shut off as he stepped back into the hall and came face to face with a sight that seared through his stunned brain like an electrified wire forced through his eyes.
Pembroke tried to speak or scream, but nothing other than an almost subvocal grunt emerged from his throat.
It was something between ape and human, with a fur-covered body and glistening white fangs in its protruding muzzle, and it was there … standing right before him and reaching for his neck with clawed hands that dripped with thick red blood.
Finally, the wail burst from him the way the return lightning charge leaps from the ground into the storm clouds. With a mind too deeply shocked by a vision of unacceptable reality, Pembroke fell more than leaped again through the open doorway behind him. Somehow, he managed to hit the switch that closed the door before the nightmare following him could reach it. His fingers acted almost independently of his mind to flick the locking mechanism on the wall to insure that that thing out there could not open the metal door and get to him with those awful teeth and claws, even if it were human enough to understand the principles of an opening and closing switch.
What in the name of god was it? Some kind of human/ape hybrid brought about to satisfy the curiosity of soulless anthropologists? An accidental or intentional victim of genetic manipulation? A worker disfigured by the terrible powers with which he had been dealing? A were … a real werewolf!
By all that was holy, that was Gerald Cummings out there! The psycho killer who had claimed all along that he was an actual monster! He had changed from a perfectly ordinary-looking adult male into that lusting, savage teratological chimera that was trying to tear down the door at his back!
For an instant, the pure reporter in William Pembroke gained ascendancy over the political fanatic, and he glowed with the powerful images created by this realization.
Then Cummings hit the door with a force far more than human, actually denting it and sending Pembroke sprawling into the unrelieved darkness of the storage room. The sense of wonder was sharply replaced by the heart-stopping certainty that even this steel barrier was not going to keep the beast away from him; unlike the labs with their outer disinfectant chambers, Cummings had only one layer to break through before reaching him.
Pembroke was on his feet and flailing blindly along the wall for the light switch, desperate to find his way down the stairwell to the emergency exit, when he suddenly remembered the bomb. When he thought that the siren had been alerting the installation to his presence in the building rather than Cummings’ escape, he had put all of his smuggled explosive into one big wad and reset the timer to detonate it in just over a minute, giving himself but seconds to get out of the effective range of the blast. Now he was trapped in the same room with the device, unable to flee due to the other horror waiting beyond the door!
Pembroke was emitting a wordless wail of terror when he abandoned the search for the light switch and charged into the heart of the big room in an insane attempt to find and reset the charge; he probably would have been unsuccessful had he somehow located the bomb. His final thoughts were about the strange devotion to madness which transforms ordinary people into lovers of the bomb and how this devotion destroys so many of them in so many ways.
Outside of the room, the Man’s enraged mind had no such time or ability to consider the abstract concept when the entire wall at which he had been clawing vanished before the onslaught of a powerful, invisible enemy that clutched him in gigantic fists and threw him like a mere toy hundreds of feet down the length of the corridor.
He fought it every instant of the way.
Blake Corbett had a woman lying across his right shoulder and another in his arms when the explosion raced through the building.
Though he was much closer to the front entrance than to the zero point of the blast, he staggered like a drunken seaman in a storm while the noise and shock flowed through the atmosphere and the building around him. Three members of the rescue team lost their footing and dropped to the floor, further injuring the survivors of the attacks by Cummings in the observation room and the gallery.
“What was that?” cried one of the men from the floor. His nerves had been only a strand away from snapping even before they had left the office on their mission.
“An explosion,” a member of the compound’s security team (and their nominal leader) answered needlessly.
“An explosion of what?” the first man demanded. “Is this goddamned place going to incinerate us now, too?”
“Get up, let’s keep going,” Blake prodded him.
With all five helping one another, the team resumed their fast trek back to the office, weighed down by six other bodies. The load had little effect on their speed, as hopped as they were on adrenalin and pure fear. They were all aware that Cummings was still prowling the corridor, and not one, not the bravest or most altruistic, had failed to regret volunteering to search for the still-living in that charnel house they had just left.
Curiously, though, Corbett, who had always considered himself to be basically an average, medium-heroic/medium-cowardly American man, was finding an unusual thrill in daring to travel through the same hallways as Cummings unprotected. He had gone through all of the nightmares common to childhood and had laughingly shrieked at the cinematic horrors offered by the theaters in the days when admission was seventy-five cents; and he knew that these experiences had worked on his excellent imagination to decide his life’s work for him. But he had never seriously believed that he would react in any fashion other than open hysteria should he be transported by some magic into one of his own fantasies (that is, one of his unpleasant fantasies).
He had never wanted to climb mountains, race fast cars, or leap from planes flying thousands of miles above the earth, and he had never so much as attempted to understand the inner passions that drove other men and women to do so. But now, here in this electrically-charged reality of sudden, unnatural death, Corbett knew that the strange temptations offered by danger and uncertainty could easily become addictive.
If one lived that long.
“Maybe they blew him up,” the nervous man speculated while they lurched along. “Yeah, they’re all kinds of chemicals in this place, right? Why couldn’t somebody who knew how to put together a bomb of some kind and blow him to Hell?”
“That’s a thought,” replied Blake, who, in spite of his perverse thrill in the situation, was eager to see Cummings in a condition that would render him incapable in hurting anyone ever again.
“Probably somebody trying to get out,” the gray-coated security man added. He had been the only Institute employee to volunteer for the rescue effort. He had a gun in a side holster, but as of yet he hadn’t bothered to draw it.
“Blast their way out?” asked Corbett.
“Yes. Axton’s quarantined the building, which means it’s sealed as tight as a can of sardines, and nobody gets out without the doctor’s order. That explosion sounded like it came from the rear exit, which leads to an emergency escape tunnel in the hills. But that won’t open unless somebody in the control center triggers it, so I figure somebody who doesn’t want to spend the rest of the night in here with that monster was trying to blast his way out using nitroglycerin. I hope he made it.”
“I hope that thing’s dead,” whispered the first man.
Before they reached the office, a second alarm went off in response to the explosion, but it ended much sooner than the first to be replaced by a commanding male voice that echoed throughout the facility.
“May I have the attention of everyone presently in the main corridor of the building. This is Dr. Heath Axton, director of the research and diagnostic department of the Institute, and I am hereby ordering an alert pertaining to anyone who may yet be in the hallway: there is a vicious killer loose within the building, and in an effort to demobilize him, in thirty seconds following the end of this message the entire corridor will be flooded with a combinative gas based principally upon halothane and designed to render the murderer unconscious.
“This gas will be powerful but neither poisonous or explosive. Nevertheless, all effort should be made to isolate oneself from the effects of the anesthesia; to do so, please enter any of the laboratories throughout the building and close the door after entering. Do not go into the lounges or lecture rooms, as the gas will be fed into these areas. Once in the labs, lock the door against any person who cannot identify himself over the intercom system provided in each. Remain isolated until you receive further instructions from me. That is all at this time.”
“Thirty seconds, we’d better step on it!” the security man shouted, and they did so, reaching the office in half that time.
Willing hands relieved Corbett of the two limp forms that he carried almost as soon as he was fully inside the room. He didn’t bother to see that the women were placed in the care of the doctors because he had something just as urgent to attend to in the rear room of the office. It took a number of precious seconds to scramble through the crowd, especially thick at the irradiation chamber connecting the two rooms, and still more for someone to point out the white-haired man behind a large desk as Axton, so Corbett wasn’t much worried about social amenities as he shoved his way forward and broke in on a conversation that the man was involved with at his approach.
“Axton? Dr. Axton?” he asked swiftly.
The other looked up with some irritation showing in his face. “Yes?”
“My name’s Blake Corbett, and I was with the rescue team that went back to the observation room. You’ve got to give us five or ten more minutes before releasing the gas!”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible, Mr. Corbett; the arrangements have been made with the exterior crew, and the operation begins in a matter of seconds.” Axton’s calm demeanor seemed to place him above the fear and pain of those surrounding him.
If Corbett had expected his sincerity and the importance of his words to be conveyed to Axton through his red-stained hands and clothing—covered with the blood of others—he was mistaken.
“You don’t understand,” Blake said earnestly. “We could only bring back six people, and there must be as many as a dozen still alive but critically injured in those two rooms alone! If you flood them with that gas, they’ll almost certainly die!”
“Mr. Corbett, for one thing, I cannot allow you to risk your life further; for another, Cummings must be stopped now, before he can spread his disease to even more innocent people.”
“Just five minutes!”
“It can’t be done.”
Blake looked at the telephone on the desk. “Does that have an outside line?”
“That’s what it’s used for,” Axton replied with icy sarcasm.
“Good.” The writer lifted the receiver and began to punch the buttons on its face. His attempt to stop the gassing was suddenly short-circuited by a pair of large hands that grasped the backs of his arms and another that took the receiver from him and replaced it on its cradle. He turned to see two of the security guards responding to Axton’s unspoken directions.
“Please show Mr. Corbett to a seat in the back of the room,” the doctor ordered. Then he turned back to his original conversation as if the entire matter were settled.
Which it was. Blake had a brief urge to shake free of the two goons and pound some sense into that intellectually smug head, but his inner voice just as quickly pointed out the ridiculousness of the effort. Instead of railing indignantly, he remained cool and found himself firmly seated on a wide couch which ran along the very rear of the office.
“Welcome to the Gulag, comrade,” said his companion on the couch, an angry and dark-eyed Nick Grundel.
“In trouble already, eh? I should have expected it,” Blake replied.
“We exist in a new kingdom, A.B., one in which the laws of nature have been completely restructured—which we expected—and one in which common sense and self-preservation are punishable offenses.”
“Well put, Nicolas.”
They had said nothing else before a distinct rise in the noise level of the crowd in both rooms tipped them that Axton’s plan for neutralizing the demon that had been Gerald Cummings had gone into effect. Ignoring the instructions and piercing looks that were directed at them by Axton, Druitt, and their flunkies, both leaped into the eager rush toward the front window and used their swiftly developing prowess at shoving and wriggling to work their way ahead.
Meg Talley was already at the window, scouting nervously for any sign of the return of the horrible thing that had once more taken an agonizing grip on her life … just as his claws had once ripped into the flesh of her back. She had slipped into an almost comatose state in the gallery next to the observation room when Cummings changed before her eyes; the total, terrifying awe of that incredible moment (which she had once searched for, if only to prove to the world that she was neither insane or a liar) fed upon itself in a growing cycle like a squawk in a public address system until it became too much for her to cope with.
Blake and Nick had been forced to drag her like inorganic baggage from the room and into this office. She would not let that happen to her again, though, even if she had to die while maintaining control of her own mind.
The lights of the corridor beyond the window blinked off so suddenly that for an instant Meg wasn’t certain that it hadn’t been some sort of rupture in her eyes that had produced the effect of blindness. But the bulbs in the office stayed on, making it even more of a beacon to anything lurking in the hall. This must be a part of Axton’s design for capturing the werewolf, she decided, though an unannounced one. She pressed her face to the window along with just about everyone else who could squeeze closely enough to do so. Then the air vents high on the walls became the focus of all attention.
The gas squirted swiftly from them. In the darkness it was difficult to be sure what color the blowing clouds were, but a guess would have been dark red or brown. It was a heavy vapor that poured almost like water toward the floor and roiled there with unstated malevolence. It filled their entire range of visibility in a surprisingly short amount of time. In only minutes, the flood had risen to where it seemed that the building was under a red/brown sea, with only the room in which they stood sealed against it.
“How long are they going to leave it flooded?” asked a man to Meg’s left. “I mean, nothing can exist on pure anesthetic gas, can it? He’ll eventually die without oxygen.”
“I hope he does,” someone spat viciously. “I hope to God he strangles on his own spit and goes straight to Hell for what he’s done here tonight!”
“Don, we must keep in mind the fact that he’s not responsible for what he’s doing,” said the calmer voice of a woman.
“I don’t give a damn about what he does or doesn’t know, only what’s happened, and I want him to die for it.”
No one bothered to openly disagree with this sentiment.
The gas remained on the other side of the window for more than five minutes before someone noticed that it was swirling furiously about the vents located near the floor in the hallway and pointed this out to the rest. They watched in fascination as the level dropped from well above their heads until it was not more than a film at their feet and again looked quite liquid-like. The operation lasted less than a minute, and four strange-looking figures quickly emerged from the rear office on their way to the door.
The figures were actually four men dressed in bright orange protective suits that resembled hybridizations of astronauts’ extravehicular wear and firefighters’ asbestos gear. Their glass-faced helmets, as well as their boots and gloves, were securely affixed to the rest of the suits to prevent any exchange of gases or contamination from the outside atmosphere. Though they weren’t actually pressure suits, each did have oxygen equipment strapped to the back and feeding hoses attached to the helmets.
“Please let us through,” ordered the figure at the head of the group. Meg recognized him as Dr. Axton. “Let us by, please! We’re going after Cummings!”
“What are you going to do with him?” one of the network reporters shouted.
“We’re going to place him in a restraining cell, and no, you may not come along, Mr. Hoffman.” Axton’s response actually drew a brief wave of laughter from the emotionally keyed-up assembly. “We feel certain that Cummings has been incapacitated by the gas in the corridor, and we are taking along a well-equipped medical kit, in case he requires further sedation.
“Once he is safely disabled, we will convey him to lab thirty-four, which contains a hardened steel cage designed to hold large apes. When he is locked in this cage, I’ll call off the quarantine and allow medical help from outside. We’re wearing these suits to guard against any residual effects of the gas, as well as to provide protection against injuries and contamination due to reflexive struggling on the part of Mr. Cummings.”
“Let them through,” called a man near the door. The feeling of renewed hope bordered on optimism that, after only an hour, their ordeal had ended was infectious, and everyone jostled everyone else in order to open an avenue for the suited team.
The four men left quickly through the dark corridor. Meg assumed (correctly) that the lights had been kept off on the belief that it would make the men less conspicuous in the brilliant orange outfits should it happen that the gas had failed to subdue Cummings.
“At least it’s nearly over,” a woman standing by her sighed.
“Maybe,” Meg said, staring out into the cavernous gloom. “Maybe it is.” But there was no conviction in her voice; an instinct born in pre-history whispered repeatedly to her that this night had a lot longer to go before she saw its end.
Nearly half an hour passed, silently gnawing at their fresh confidence. No one would openly speculate as to the cause of the delay, but they all secretly prayed for the goodness of no news. Meg found the three men with whom she had shared the months-long fantasy/nightmare, and they talked quietly among themselves while the rest of the people waiting for reprieve gained better control of themselves. Those who had been most severely and painfully injured during the attacks had been given powerful drugs to ease their suffering and combat shock. In all, there were few suffering moans to be heard amid the murmur of still-intimidated but hopeful conversation.
“I don’t care if they don’t come back before daybreak, as long as Cummings doesn’t show up, either,” Grundel said with an honesty uncolored by false courage.
“Oh, Nick, why can’t you just once forget about yourself and think about somebody who is trying to help us all?” Meg asked wearily.
“Because I’m a lousy actor,” he answered. “Who are you worried about in this situation? Axton and his troops? They’re adults, they saw what Cummings has become, and they chose to take him this way instead of bringing in men armed with the right equipment and armor; so don’t ask me to say any ‘Ave Maria’s’ for them. The only individual I plan to do any crying over is Nicolas Gabriel Grundel.”
“I wonder if the Catholic Church realizes how lucky it is that you’re an avowed agnostic,” Doug Morgan said. His chest wounds had been disinfected and bound with a few wrappings of gauze, and his ruined shirt had been traded in for a light coat that had been removed from a man who no longer needed it.
“The way I see it, the longer the men are gone, the more my opinion of scientific minds is strengthened,” Corbett said. “Axton and friends are probably in that lab running all kinds of esoteric tests on Cummings right now, not at all concerned about what mental tortures we’re being put through.”
“Ever the peacemaker, right, Blake?” Nick asked, grinning.
“Just trying to survive, Nicolas.”
More minutes passed in agonizing slowness. The conversations continued, but they consisted of entirely inconsequential matters. The tension in the air was gradually heightening, but there had been no outbursts when a man whose identity was unknown to the four stood at the front of the office just in front of the glass door and called for silence. Because his voice was professional, his smile reassuring, and his purposeful manner comforting to the worried and confused civilians, everyone shut up and turned their attention to him. They never heard that apparently important statement. Just as he parted his lips to begin, a knotted brown fist smashed through the glass panel in a hammer-like blow and hit him with a downward stroke with such force that his skull was split in half and he was dead from massive brain damage before his body could reach the floor.
The rest of the door was blown from its hinges and ten feet into the room as if by a wind of hurricane force. The creature stood in the opening to the hall like a god—some god of death that had returned from mythology to prey on the stunned people before him. They screamed in one voice, but even their terror couldn’t match the power of his triumphant roar.
Like a living sea, the trapped people surrounding Meg, Nick, Doug, and Blake receded like the tide toward the comparative safety of the rear office. The four had been caught in the worst possible position by the attack—seated on the floor with their legs folded under them—and for several chaotic, painful seconds while the other people in the room stampeded over them, it looked as if they might never stand again. Shoes with spike heels and wide heavy soles stamped on them, catching their ribs and shoulders and knocking all four over under the hysterical flood; Grundel was hit over his left eye with stunning effect by a man’s foot, and he couldn’t feel the pain of Meg’s grip in his hair as she kept him from toppling to his side; Corbett muscled his way to his knees only to pitch face forward when a woman fell on him after being shoved down by those behind her, but he managed to roll from beneath her unconscious form and stagger to his feet while trying to lift her as he was swept toward the steel-doored chamber in the back of the room; and Morgan actually slipped against a fur-covered leg and foot before a burst of sheer, mindless panic gave him the strength to erupt out of the flow of fear-crazed men and women and provide a trough for his colleagues to stumble up into ahead of him.
The escape, the place of safety that had drawn them to it with its metal shield against the flashing claws and teeth of the beast became a deadly trap when they finally reached it. The total space of both offices combined could accommodate perhaps forty people under normal circumstances, but now almost one hundred terrified men and women were trying to force themselves into half of that space, the rear control center while those already back there were attempting to stop the rush so that they could close the doors to the irradiation chamber. The hysterical group not only had to cope with the bloodthirsty apparition that was savaging them from behind, but they also had to fight with equally panic-stricken human beings ahead.
Blake Corbett was slammed brutally into the simulated wood panel wall next to the outer steel door of the irradiation chamber. He stared down in silent shock at the flesh and blood barrier that was holding that door open in spite of the combined energies of the electrical motor that powered it and the frantic efforts of those inside the chamber to drag it closed. Those were people lying there in the track, people trapped next to one another like packed fish and held immobile by the horizontal pressure of the door and the weight of still more people scrambling over them to safety. They didn’t mean to block the door; they simply couldn’t get out of its way!
In spite of the ear-shattering wails of horror inundating him, Blake distinctly heard the regularly-spaced popping sounds of breaking ribs. Hands wet with blood thrust into the faces of these doomed people from inside the chamber as those in the rear portion of the center tried to close off the avenue of attack for the approaching monster.
“Good god, no!” Corbett screamed. He tried to reach down and pull the nearest man from the awful prison, but he was pressed so firmly to the wall by dozens of others that he couldn’t move. Bodies continued to fly within inches of his face as the panicked victims desperately worked to shove their way into the already overflowing chamber.
For just an instant, Corbett’s mind was drawn back to his college days and the antiquated-Volkswagen-stuffing party that he once been a member of; then the werewolf’s roars jerked him cruelly back to the present.
Cummings was having an orgiastic explosion in the tight corner of Hell. His sole purpose in existence was to kill, and he was engaged in this by slashing through the layers of people who were grinding Blake into the wall.
The writer knew that he could never force his way into the chamber, where men the size of pro linebackers were being tossed back like children; and he also realized that he and all the others could never overcome the monster, a creature that could never tire and never be disabled … until morning …
“You’re the point now, man! Get us the hell out of here!” Grundel suddenly screamed in his ear.
Corbett looked around to find that Nick, Meg, and Doug were linked behind him like cars on the track behind a locomotive. And they were expecting him to lead them out of this.
It was obvious that they couldn’t worm their way into the next office, and, with Cummings darting gleefully up and down the crumbling wall of humanity—wounding rather than killing, so overwhelmed was he by the blazing joy of murder—it was just as clear that they could not retreat, either. He realized that indecision could prove fatal as fast as making the wrong move.
Then he saw the only chance. The mass of people trapped in this outer office was shifting under Cummings’ assault like a fluid in a tilting glass vessel; one “arm” of people extended toward the large window at the front of the room, though no one had yet reached the point of courage or careless panic that would be required to run across that deadly, twenty-foot stretch of open floor. That was the way, Blake realized, and the only opportunity that any of them had to save themselves, even if just temporarily.
He began to move toward the front of the office. Pressed so hard against the fake paneling that he was almost a part of the pattern, he instinctively presented his back to Cummings as he slid behind the frozen people who were separating him from the beast. Grundel and the others followed his lead by way of Nick’s tight grip on his right shoulder, but the rest of the room seemed too terrified to even understand what the four were trying to do.
In seconds, Corbett had reached a point where he was no longer protected by another body from the monster. He turned to see Cummings charging in wild abandon up and down the line of people, some of whom were struck on three or more occasions before they fell. Oh, sweet Jesus, he thought madly, somebody’s got to stop this, something’s got to happen!
“Run, baby, run!” Grundel hissed.
Instead, Corbett stepped away from the wall directly toward Cummings. Come and get me, bastard, he dared the creature silently.
“Corbett, for God’s sake, get back!” Morgan cried.
Blake grasped the arm of a large, overstuffed, brown vinyl chair and shouted as loudly as he could. His voice crackled with rage and pierced the cloud of pain and fear that was filling the room like a physical presence.
Cummings heard the wordless challenge and stopped his rampage to stare in obvious surprise at this weak, defenseless being that had become the first to defy him since the night began. Blood drooled down his chest, and an almost dead man trembled feebly in his right fist, but, for a moment, all of the ecstasy of a roomful of unresisting victims was forgotten. The claw-like nails of his feet clicked loudly on the floor as he moved with a strange deliberateness to answer this challenge.
Blake Corbett was not a big man. His large, black-rimmed glasses reinforced the stereotypical image of his profession. He just didn’t look like someone who would confront the nightmare that was approaching him. Cummings’ startled restraint lasted for only seconds, and when the metamorphosed killer charged at him, Blake held his ground like an armed soldier until the last possible instant and then, with the strength of desperation, whipped the chair before him and into the legs of the beast, who was too close to dodge it.
Cummings collided with the heavy piece of furniture, and his own momentum caused him to pitch over it directly into Corbett, with both crashing to the floor in a tangle of flailing limbs. Meg reacted instantly by grabbing a standing ashtray and swinging it with all of her strength into the struggling pair. She knew that the blow was as likely to strike Corbett as Cummings, but she also knew that unless something was done to help separate the former from those deadly jaws, his incredible courage would have benefitted them nothing.
Her prophesy proved correct: the first chop that she brought down on the writhing bodies drew a sharp yelp of pain from Corbett. But her second swing, low and up-driving like a golfing stroke, popped Cummings off of his intended victim and allowed Blake to struggle free. Morgan responded like a member of a finely-honed team and rammed a heavy sofa into the rolling creature with enough force to drive him tightly into a corner of the room in a defensive curl.
“Run! Get the hell out of here!” Corbett screamed as he leaped to his feet and grasped a wooden hat rack for a weapon. He and the others realized that they were battling a creature whose pure physical strength would be beyond their efforts to counter if he were given a chance to gain his feet and bearings. They had to keep Cummings on the defensive just as long as they could to give the rest a chance to escape that bloody room.
And the people exploded out of the rear of the first office as soon as they found Cummings momentarily at bay. The shattered doorway was no longer large enough to accommodate the flood of screaming people, and someone driven past all restraint by sheer terror threw himself into the huge window like a shell from a mortar. The glass shattered with painful shrillness. Within moments, men and women were leaping and rolling over the waist-high wooden frame and into the dark corridor, so that all of the remaining fragments were knocked loose in seconds. The room emptied of people as if by magic.
He was alone so swiftly that Corbett didn’t realize he was the only man left fighting the rabid killer until the hat rack that he had been using to keep Cummings from regaining his feet was knocked from his hands and out of reach. Looking wildly about for another weapon, Blake found himself standing in a newly-evacuated, relatively vast room.
“I’ll be damned,” he whispered.
Cummings lunged to his feet, and Blake stumbled back against a wall. From the back of the room, the sounds of people desperately struggling to remove dead and near-dead bodies from the path of the irradiation chamber’s door caught Cummings’ attention, even as he reached out for Corbett’s throat, and saved the latter’s life.
Blake knew that there was nothing he could do alone to hold off the monster any longer, so he vaulted over the empty window frame with a last futile shout to those in the back office to get the irradiation chamber closed. When he got to his feet in the black hallway and looked to see if Cummings would pursue him, he found that the beast had chosen the way that held the most prey and had scrambled through the still-open metal doors to spread his mania among the dozens who cowered inside the chamber and the second office beyond.
Corbett couldn’t stay there and listen to any more of the horrible noises coming from the rear office, sounds that he had described on paper countless times without once understanding the truth of what he wrote, so he turned and ran into the contracting depths of the dark corridor. The screams of the damned souls chased him every step of the way.