Vignette in Steel
The second massive flight within the hour took those who escaped the butchery of the two offices in both directions around the long circle that looped the interior of the quarantined building. Terror literally consumed each of them, but somehow the directions given by Axton earlier in the ordeal remained strong enough to draw them to the laboratories and the protection they represented.
Finding the labs was easy, but getting into them appeared to be impossible, at least at first. Nearly all of the people within the installation had been alerted to the emergency, though the majority were still ignorant as to its cause, and they had heeded the alarm and Axton’s instructions to keep themselves locked away from the danger. For this reason, the labs that the people who were fleeing the offices initially encountered remained closed to them despite their frantic efforts to get inside. The urgent cries that they used in attempt to persuade those within to open the chamber doors were generally ignored; caution and the blatant incredibility of the victims’ tales overcame any natural compassion felt by those already locked away.
Something was ravaging everyone it touched, these people knew, whether it was a monster or a monstrous virus, and they were determined that it would not have the opportunity to do the same to them.
Cummings was occupied with the trapped victims in the central office, however, and the blind panic of those who had escaped there carried them past the locked rooms to doors that opened to their touch. These doors admitted them to dark, well-equipped work areas where no sophisticated research or experimentation was presently underway and where the only sounds were the low, tranquilizing notes of the piped-in music. A few people recalled enough of the layout of the building to race to the front entrance and others stumbled on it accidentally, but that escape route was just as securely locked as the doors to most of the labs.
Only ten minutes following the mad rush out of the central control office, the main corridor was again quiet, as if awaiting the next outburst from an ancient fury. In the darkness, only the regularly-spaced red lights illuminating the lab numbers above the doors kept their weak, silent vigil for the horror that stalked out there, in the shadows.
It was one-twenty-six a.m.
This man is one of those “superhuman individualists” types, Curt Hammond thought with the incisive and generally reliable grasp of personalities that he often employed in his job as a television reporter. The only other person in this laboratory was a medium-height, husky man with close cut, sun-bleached hair and the eyes of Clint Eastwood. The man had come into the room just behind Hammond, and though he was bleeding freely from a gruesome trench that dug through his left forearm, he ripped two strips from his shirt and bound the wound without asking for aid or uttering a sound throughout the painful operation. Now he was silently scouting the lab for weapons or medicine or something.
Obviously a victim of the strong, quiet, William S. Hart Syndrome.
“Listen, mister, can I help you find whatever you’re looking for?” Hammond asked, primarily to break the silence.
The other man gazed at him with that cold, appraising stare that Hammond had hated since the days of his youth, when his older brothers had employed the same technique. Then the man replied, “Not unless you know where the howitzers are stored.” His voice was an entirely appropriate half-whispered threat. “It’ll take at least that to stop Cummings.”
“Who wants to stop him? If he can come through those doors, he deserves to get us.” That was intended as a tension-breaking quip, but it fell flat and rebounded in Hammond’s face; what he had just seen could not be further removed from humor of any kind.
“He’ll come through.” The other man’s words contained a sharp edge of conviction that was more suited to the moment.
“Sure, and you’re crazy if you believe that!” Hammond spat, with his own fear giving the words more bite than he had intended. “He can’t knock down those steel doors; not even something that’s only marginally human could possess that kind of strength.”
The man didn’t answer. Instead, he turned away and continued to shuffle among the flasks and tubes on the tables near the back of the lab.
Hammond sighed loudly. Even if he had to spend but a few hours in this hot little cage, he didn’t want to do so with a hostile cellmate who seemed ready to open the doors and chase after Cummings with an unlit Bunsen burner. Under no circumstances should those blasted doors be opened again before dawn. Hammond stood and walked to the other man’s side. “I didn’t mean for that last remark to sound so smartassed. I’m Curtis Hammond, with KSAL, Salem, Oregon.”
The man looked at him for a moment before responding, “Jeremy Melchior, freelance photographer.”
“Well, I hope that doesn’t exhaust the topics of conversation. We’ve got some time to spend in here, until sunrise, whenever that is.”
“For the next five hours and twenty-five minutes,” Melchior said, looking to his watch. “The sun comes up at six-fifty-five.”
I should have guessed that his super-independent psychosis would have driven him to check out the most obscure details of this situation even before he showed up at the Institute, Hammond thought.
“And that may not be our salvation,” Melchior went on, in an uncharacteristic burst of loquaciousness.
Curt waited a few seconds for the follow-up explanation, and when it failed to arrive, he asked, “What did you mean by that?”
Melchior answered without pausing in his thorough search of their surroundings. “Simply that the sun may return Cummings to normal, or what we consider normal, but it won’t automatically get us out of this building. Axton put a total quarantine into effect, and I have an idea that he is the only person who can withdraw it before the required calendar month has elapsed.”
“So, he’ll clap the nut in irons and open the doors for us as soon as it’s safe.”
“Axton went looking for Cummings—remember?—and he never came back.”
An icy fist gripped Hammond’s heart. “You think he’s dead, then?”
“It seems probable. If the anesthetic gas affected the monster at all, it was only for a short amount of time, so Axton and the men with him weren’t met by the helpless body they expected. If we’re sealed in here for a month, food and water should present no problems, but unless we can kill Cummings while he’s in total human form, another thing that I doubt, we’ll have to go through at least one more night of this. The next full moon is on January 13.”
“Don’t be a fool. I’m not going to spend Christmas and New Year’s locked in here.” When this prompted no reply, Hammond’s nervousness drove him to anger once more. “Besides, it’s nothing but idiocy to think that he can get through to us at all.”
“Deny it, then,” Melchior said calmly.
“You son of a bitch,” Hammond whispered. Melchior appeared not to hear.
Melchior continued his patrol of the available equipment in silence, which Hammond contributed to, until he had made a complete circle and returned to the speaker panel on the wall next to the door. After fiddling with the small buttons located on the panel, he pressed one and spoke into the metal screen in a loud voice, “This is Jeremy Melchior, and I am in room number …” he paused to look at the block letters printed in green above the door to the irradiation chamber, “C-4, which is about three-eighths of the way around the corridor in a clockwise direction. I am attempting to contact anyone in any other room, and specifically anyone in the central control room with a link to the outside.” There was a quiet wait of perhaps four seconds, and then the speaker seemed to explode with excited voices shouting acknowledgement and their respective room numbers.
“Seems as if a number of our companions managed to survive Cummings long enough to reach at least temporary safety,” Hammond observed. Melchior smiled for the first time since entering the room.
Only after the clashing voices from the other labs had died down did Melchior attempt to broadcast another message. “This is Melchior again. Since it appears that we will be in our present situation at least until daybreak, I suggest that we maintain an inter-office communication, both to monitor Cummings’ position and to exchange pertinent ideas and information, such as possible emergency escape routes and other items which can be provided by the staff of the building.
“In case you are alone in an office and haven’t yet figured out the operation of the communications system, the buttons on the wall panel are marked ‘Corridor’ and ‘General’; the first is to be used only when speaking with someone immediately outside your door, and the second is for building-wide broadcast. To speak, depress the button, and release it to listen. I propose we begin by contacting anyone in the central control center. Answer now.” He removed his finger from the button and waited, though without any luck. “Is there anyone in the central control office? That’s the room where most of the reporters were assembled when Cummings made his second attack on us. Anyone?”
“Strike three,” Hammond said after the silence had lasted for several seconds.
Melchior ignored him. “All right, let’s try to locate Dr. Heath Axton, the director of the center. If he is alive but unable to answer for himself, would someone please do so for him?”
Again there was no reply, and Melchior began to wonder whether his transmissions were reaching any further than the room in which he waited.
“Next suggestion. To give everyone an idea of the layout of the building, why don’t we have each room answer in order and give a brief account of the situation therein and how many people it contains. The room numbers are printed above the doorway. We’ll start with A-l, which, I take it, is to the right of the building’s entrance.”
This time, a response was elicited, as a frightened voice replied with the requested details. The action continued with smooth progression, except for occasional leapings of empty rooms, through room C-4 and three offices beyond them, until it bridged a large gap to the “G” labs on the far side of the circle. This told Melchior that he and Hammond were holed up in one of the rooms farthest from the front of the building. Hardly anyone in the labs, sleeping quarters, cafeteria, and remaining rooms on the far side knew what was going on; they had been aroused by the general alarms, but they had little knowledge of what havoc Cummings had already created. Some could only take the emergency and the revelations as pieces of a huge, sick jest, but everyone agreed not to take any chances at this point.
“Who’s located close to the central office?” Melchior asked minutes later.
“Trumbull here, C-4, and we’re next-door to it,” a man replied.
“Good, Trumbull. You won’t have far to go to inspect the rear office and find out if the equipment there is still operational. We need to secure an outside line—”
“Take a hike, Melchior,” came the terse answer.
“What?”
“I said forget it! Nobody in here is going out there until it’s safe!”
“We can’t be sure that we’re safe in the labs,” Melchior pointed out. “Personally, I’m convinced that Cummings can bull his way through these doors and will do so when he’s driven to it by lack of game.”
“There’re dozens of people in the hall!” Trumbull snapped.
“Dead people,” Melchior said. “His conduct in the control office proves that he craves living prey. The quicker we can get armed help from the outside, the more of us there will be who survive this night.”
“So you say,” Trumbull grunted.
Melchior whispered a short curse. “Okay, what about the other side, Richards in B-9?”
“Go to hell, Melchior,” said Richards.
Melchior slammed the edge of his right fist against the wall in a burst of anger.
Hammond laughed bitterly. “What’s the matter, Macho Man? The rest of the world doesn’t measure up to your standard of suicidal bravery? Why don’t you go take a look?”
Their eyes met and transmitted the intense repulsion that each felt for the other. It lasted only an instant, but that was long enough to complete the acidic exchange. Melchior nodded once and then depressed the speaker button.
“Melchior here,” he said. “I’m going out to check the center. I’ll relay my findings as soon as possible.” Then he returned to the vials and bottles on the tables at the back of the room, wordlessly preparing for his venture to the outside.
No more than two minutes had gone by when the wall speaker erupted with desperate pleas from the corridor, “Is somebody in there? Listen, I’m hurt and I need to get inside! Please open the door for me!” The voice was that of a man.
Hammond reached the speaker before Melchior and answered with a cold, but—to him—only rational response, “There are empty rooms down the hall. Try one of those.”
“I told you I’m hurt, and I’ve got … someone with me! We can’t make it any further!” His terror was like a thick fog blowing through the speaker. “Christ, man, I’m only asking for two seconds! Cummings is nowhere around here!”
Hammond wasn’t able to answer, because Melchior arrived at his side and almost casually brushed him away from the panel. “You say the hall is clear?” he asked through the intercom.
“That’s right, there’s nobody else out here as far as I can see, but it’s so damned dark—”
“How many in your group?”
“Two! Me and Bradshaw!”
“Count to ten.”
“What?” demanded the voice.
“Count to ten, aloud and slowly,” Melchior repeated coolly.
“Uh, okay, whatever you say. “O-one … two …” The man obediently ran through the numbers, obviously frightened but controlled enough to keep the cadence in keeping with Melchior’s order. By the time he had finished, almost fifteen seconds has passed. “Is that all right? Can I come inside now?”
“I’m going to open the outer door to the irradiation chamber, and when you get yourself and your friend inside, rap on the interior door loudly enough to be heard. That way I’ll be able to admit you without having both doors open at once.”
Hammond was surprised by this display of caution from a man he had instinctively labelled Mr. Gung Ho, and he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Why the count?”
Melchior positioned himself to the right side of the entrance before he replied, “A man in danger of losing his life can lie most convincingly, even if death is breathing down his neck. But if Cummings had been charging down the hall at him and he realized it, there was no way that he would be able to count slowly to ten just to please me.” Sly, Hammond thought. But he was not going to admit this assessment to Melchior.
Three swift knocks on the heavy inner door alerted them to the presence of the men in the irradiation chamber, and at Melchior’s signal, Hammond closed the outer door before switching the inner to open. If they had been expecting the arrival of another wounded and frantic refugee from Cummings’ assaults, they were certainly surprised at the sudden appearance of a large pistol in a white-knuckled hand that thrust out of the chamber to the shout of, “Get your hands up!”
Surprised or not, Melchior reacted like a trained professional. With the flat edge of his left hand, he chopped down on the wrist holding the gun, and his hard right fist flashed into the chamber to land solidly on the chin of the man who had been holding it. The man went down on the unmoving body of still another.
“Oh god, don’t hit me, I’m sorry!” the new arrival screamed.
Melchior calmly stooped to retrieve the fallen weapon and then used his free hand to drag the two men—one in a white patient’s smock and the other in a bloody policeman’s uniform—into the lab so that he could close the door against the foremost danger of the night. The patient, though still conscious, was bleeding from the punch he had received in the mouth. He was handcuffed by the right wrist to the policeman.
“You can start explaining any time you wish,” Melchior said.
“Okay, just take it easy, I’m not a murderer or anything,” the man responded. “My name’s Ray Klemper, and I’m a psychiatric patient here. I was in bed when the alarm went off, but that thing … that monster broke in about half an hour ago, into the prisoner ward and started just … Jesus, we were chained in the beds, and we couldn’t get away! Then Bradshaw here came in, right by the thing, and started turning us loose. He shot it enough times to keep it off while the rest were let loose, but it got him when we went out the door. I don’t know how he got away, but he did, and he caught me in the hall … the damned conscientious idiot! He locked us together and then passed out on me. Nobody else would let us in.”
Melchior slipped the gun into his belt and checked the unconscious man. His manner was dispassionate, but thorough. “He’s alive, but not for long. I don’t think even an intensive care until could help him now.” He reached into the policeman’s pockets and came up with a key, which he tossed to Klemper. “Get the cuffs off. By the way, the gun is empty.” He remedied that situation by reloading while Klemper freed himself from the dying man.
“You’re still intent on this crazy mission?” Hammond asked as Melchior weighed the gun in his right hand.
“That’s right,” he answered. “This was the convincer.”
“Believe me, it won’t stop him.”
“No, but it should irritate him enough to give me the edge I’ll need if we meet.” He looked down at Klemper, who, unchained from his lifeless partner, had backed himself against a wall and was staring with a sort of thankful suspiciousness about the room. “You were chained to the bed, right?”
“Yeah,” replied Klemper. “Why?”
“What’d you do?”
“Come on, Melchior,” Hammond sighed. “What difference does it make?”
“Maybe survival, sport. If he’s homicidal, we may have to use the cuffs on him again to prevent an attack on ourselves. Why are you under treatment, Klemper?”
“For no reason, I didn’t do anything!” Klemper told them sullenly.
“You don’t expect us to believe that, do you?”
From the floor behind them, the torn and still body of the policeman coughed and tried to sit up. Melchior dropped to a knee and lifted the man’s head until the weakly moving lips were close to his own ear. He listened intensely for a few moments, asked for a repeat, and then carefully lay the unbreathing form back to the floor. Standing, he drew the gun and pointed it directly at Klemper’s head. “Get up,” he ordered.
“What? What’s the matter?”
“Good lord, Melchior, what do you think you’re doing?” Hammond shouted.
“Evicting a liar. Mr. Klemper swore that he wasn’t a murderer, but Officer Bradshaw told me that he is not only a rapist who prefers teenaged girls, but a sadist who accidentally went too far on the last of his victims and is now trying to beat prison with a psychiatric evaluation.”
“No!” Klemper cried. “I swear it—”
“Get up,” Melchior repeated coldly. The gun remained pointing at the man’s forehead.
Klemper slowly climbed to his feet. “What are you going to do?”
“Send you back where you came from.” He shoved Klemper toward the chamber door.
“Please, mister, please don’t put me back out there! I can’t stand the dark! He’ll find me\”
Hammond grasped Melchior’s shoulders roughly, but the other man seemed not to notice. “I won’t let you do this, Melchior, no matter what the guy might have done!” Hammond said. “You have no right to act as jury for him!”
“Oh, I’m not passing judgment; if I did, he’d have a shell in his brain right now. But he will not stay in this room. Outside.”
“You bastard!” Hammond spat.
Klemper clutched the indignation in Hammond’s voice as his last defense. “That’s right, who made you God? What right have you to got to condemn me like this?”
Melchior released the gun’s safety. “Want to die right here?”
Klemper stumbled toward the door. “No, don’t shoot me! I’m going!”
Melchior stepped to the door switch and paused before opening it. “Klemper, when you go out, turn left, skip the next half dozen labs, and you should find that just about all of the rest along the curve are empty, which means their doors will be unlocked. Personally, I wouldn’t raise a finger to stop Cummings if he were ripping your guts from your body, and I hope you fry in the chair; but, as our ever-calm friend has pointed out, I’m not a jury. You can take your chances outside or in one of the other labs, but you’re not going to foul my air.” He flipped open the chamber doors. “Now, get the hell out of here.”
Klemper released what sounded like a sigh of relief and, with a slightly wild smile on his lips, sprinted out of the room and to his left to vanish from their sight. Melchior closed the doors.
“Feeling good now?” Hammond demanded with dripping sarcasm. “Is your manliness glowing inside of you? That poor, sick kid will undoubtedly wind up with his neck torn out, but you won’t have any of his sickness polluting your space, will you?”
One of the most enraging aspects of Melchior’s character, as far as Hammond was concerned, was his complete self-control, and he maintained that icy reserve even in the face of this latest attack.
“I don’t give a flying damn what you think of me, Hammond, or who you choose to bestow your pity on, but I expect no more interference from you than your voice. This may be our night to die, and in the end, everybody faces death in their own way, but I’m not going to roll over and wait for it.
“When I go outside, you can use the same method that I used with Klemper to make certain that one door is always closed. When I’m finished, I won’t come back here. Right now, I’m going to prepare a few vials of sulfuric acid to use as backup weapons against Cummings in case I’m unable to seal myself away from him while I work on the outside line.”
“Just do what you have to and get out of here, will you?”
Melchior returned to the tables in the rear of the room and was working carefully in silence when the first loud thumping noise penetrated the inner chamber door and caught their attention. Melchior looked up sharply, and Hammond drew in a deep breath that stuck in his lungs.
“What was that?” Hammond asked.
Melchior shut him up with a wave. They listened for a repeat sound, hearing it only a heartbeat later. The second noise was also that of a muffled collision, but it was even louder and more urgent.
“Somebody’s trying to get in,” Hammond said with a touch of high panic in his voice. “It’s Klemper. He’s come back.”
Melchior trotted to the front of the room and opened the speaker channel to the corridor. “Who’s there?” he asked.
The bumping sounds increased in number and force, and now the two men faintly could hear the raging bellows that accompanied the frantic attempts to break through the outer door.
“That’s Cummings,” Melchior stated with certainty. “I thought that he would be driven to this once he ran out of breathing victims.”
“Oh my god,” whispered Hammond. “He can’t get to us, can he, Melchior? Really, I mean? It’s just impossible, isn’t it?”
A grinding shriek answered him, as its sound, so like those human cries that had dominated the last couple of hours, told the two men of what Cummings was accomplishing out of their sight, in the corridor.
Melchior punched the general call button on the intercom system. “This is lab C-4, Melchior speaking to all concerned, and that means everybody. The steel doors of the irradiation chambers cannot, I repeat, cannot withstand an all-out assault by Cummings. I base this on the evidence that’s being presented to those of us in this room.”
“Melchior, this is Loggins, lab A-5! Clarify!” ordered a woman. “Are you presently under attack?”
“That’s right,” Melchior answered, his voice sounding composed in sharp contrast to Hammond’s strangled cries in the background. “Cummings is through the outer door of the chamber and well on his way to forcing back the inner.”
“There’s one thing you can try, man, the radiant chamber itself,” Loggins said. “It can be triggered from within the lab by a switch inside a wallbox in the rear wall. If run through its preset sequence, it will heat the chamber to a high temperature and perhaps drive him back into the corridor.”
“I suppose it’s worth a try,” Melchior replied. But before he could turn away from the communications panel, Hammond had run to the back of the room and switched the system into effect. Melchior stood where he was and waited for any change in the sounds coming from the chamber; the only evident effect that the heat had on Cummings, however, was to increase the volume of his roars and the frequency of his pounding on the door. Hammond slipped to his knees, crying, while Melchior relayed the result to the tense listeners throughout the facility.
“Negative to the heat,” he said. “It only seems to increase his rage. He should be in the lab within three minutes.”
“Melchior,” said a new, unfamiliar voice, “do you have any weapons in there?”
“A policeman’s gun. It could be used as a diversionary tactic.”
“Do you have any experience in chemistry?”
“Just the most basic high school stuff. I’ve already prepared several beakers of sulfuric acid.”
“Are you sure that there is no other exit from the room? Some of these offices are connected in the rear.”
“I’m sure,” Melchior said with a grim laugh.
“Then there’s nothing … I’m sorry, but all I can advise you to do is try to lure him into the laboratory, momentarily disable him with the acid, and then escape through the open door.”
“Received. Melchior, out.” The man walked deliberately to the table at which he had been working, as if deaf to the thuds and shrill grinding noises coming from behind him, and gathered up the stoppered bottles of acid waiting there. Hammond was still on his knees in a near-fetal position, and when Melchior nudged him with a foot, it was an easy gesture, not the chiding kick that might have been expected. “Come on; give me a hand with this.”
“Leave me alone,” Curt Hammond answered in a choking tone.
Melchior reached down and shook him by the shoulder, as if to jolt him from the state of collapse. “We’ve got to act now, Hammond, so get on your feet. If we work it right, there’s a chance—”
“Get away from me, you stupid cretin!” Hammond screamed. “It’s over, we’ve lost! We’re dead!”
Melchior’s voice did harden at that. “Is this the way you’re going to die? Get up! Act like a man!” He jerked hard on the other man’s arm, but Hammond remained huddled in the floor.
“Get away from me!” Hammond was crying uncontrollably now. “Just leave me alone!”
“You goddamned pile of garbage!” Melchior spat on the floor next to him. “I can’t even feel pity for you! Fight him! Even if you won’t help me, so that maybe one of us could escape, you can die like a man instead of a whimpering dog!” When Hammond failed to respond in any fashion, he took all of the beakers of acid in his left arm so that he could hold them by pressing them to his chest, and drew the gun from his belt. “I’m going to throw him off by opening the door, and then I’m sprinting for all hell into the hall. If you hide under one of the tables, he might miss you.”
Hammond took advantage of this final bit of advice, but he couldn’t control his sobbing and he couldn’t keep from staring around the corner of the table while Melchior carried out his plan. The other man opened the only remaining curtain of protection left to them—the inner chamber door—just before it was wrenched inward and doused the startled, off-balance creature with the searing acid. Hammond watched as Melchior emptied the gun into Cummings with a cool precision and darted into the irradiation chamber, and he watched while the fleeing man was trapped by the small opening through which the werewolf had squeezed, and he watched when Jeremy Melchior died, not screaming as Hammond knew he would in the coming moments, but in impassioned cursings and defiance.
Then Hammond listened as the hard claws scraped the tile and carried Cummings into a position that was just above him. The creature stood over Hammond like Death arriving to collect another soul.
Blood and drool dripped to the floor in front of his face.