part0066

I t was quiet—too quiet, almost. He studied the very confined space and made a face. The sewer tunnels weren’t as cramped as he’d thought they would be, but the decision to bring masks was a good one. It had been Anderson’s idea, of course. Savage had thought he could cope without too much trouble.

He’d been proven wrong and damned if he didn’t know when to admit it. Even with the masks on, the place was a terrifyingly inhuman place to be. They both wore plastic suits that were supposed to keep the sewage and the smell away from them. They helped a little, obviously, but he still felt like he would never be clean again.

Behind him, Anderson muttered a curse when he slipped but managed to regain his balance. A fall was the only thing worse than having to walk through the nightmare.

“I bet you didn’t think you would do any climbing through sewers when you were offered that CEO job, huh?” Savage grinned.

“I knew from the start it wouldn’t be a cushy desk job,” his boss admitted and shook his hand to remove some of the grime that had gathered on his rubber glove when he’d caught himself from falling. “But to answer your question, no, I did not think I would trudge through sludge, much less break into a government facility through their sewers. You’d think they would have some sort of security system in place down here to keep exactly what’s happening from happening.”

“There is,” Anja interjected, and Savage had to literally flail to prevent himself from faceplanting in sewage.

“I will never get used to that,” he complained.

She continued to talk like she hadn’t heard him. “Those wires you can see running along both sides of the tunnels there work as antennae for the drones they send down there for maintenance, but they also work as hyper-sensitive motion sensors. However, instead of setting the sensors to automatically activate an alarm, they put them to register on a marker in their system and they send a drone to automatically investigate. All I really had to do was follow the line until I found a weakness in their system. I’ve intercepted all the alert messages since you got down there.”

“While I do appreciate the lucky break involved,” Anderson said stiffly, “that kind of alert system isn’t used very often in government buildings. It’s definitely not used in the buildings that have as much classified shit as the Triangle, so why are they down to this now?”

The hacker paused for a moment, apparently searching through any kind of database to find the answer to his question. Savage shook his head. He hadn’t even thought of that. He had started to get a little too used to having Anja cover his ass and might have grown a little sloppy after all this time. He needed to shape up or he would be caught with his metaphorical pants down and with nobody to help him.

She wouldn’t cover for him for the rest of his life. He couldn’t get used to having her in his ear.

“Okay, it looks like they only activated this new system a couple of months ago,” Anja advised them. “They constantly received false alarms they couldn’t track, so they made the whole system double back into the security network.”

“Is there anything in there about what actually triggers the alarms?” Anderson looked thoughtful.

“I don’t know—a software glitch or something? I could look around for it, but that would expose it to them too, and as of right now, we need this to be as broken as hell. Why are you looking a gift horse in the mouth?”

“So the horse doesn’t bite me in the ass later on,” Savage grumbled under his breath.

“I heard that,” she snapped.

“I said it aloud, didn’t I?” he replied with a grin.

“If you two could keep your lovers’ quarrels to a minimum?” It seemed like the former colonel was a little on edge although there was no indication what annoyed him to the point of lashing out. It could have been his and Anja’s bickering, of course, but he wondered if there wasn’t some kind underlying cause to his annoyance. He had been far away from his wife and kid for a while now and having a kill order hanging over your head was never a pleasant experience. The man needed to lighten up a little. Maybe they could go out and get a drink together after the mission was done. Chatting over beers would help him get over his homesickness.

Savage suddenly froze in place. His body told him something, but it took him a couple of seconds to realize what it was. The first hint that something was off was the change in the color palette around him. He wasn’t quite sure why that was what he’d chosen to focus on. Their flashlights were powerful enough to give them a good view of where they were going, but everything that wasn’t the dull grey concrete of the sewer tunnels had been black until the odd hints of blue and green that now spread across the walls.

“Anderson?” Savage gestured around them. “Do you see this or am I going crazy? A stroke, maybe?”

“Are you talking about the change in colors of the moss on the tunnels?” The other man swept his flashlight across the walls. “No, you’re not having a stroke. The jury’s still out on the crazy, though.”

“Hilarious.” He refocused on his surroundings and a sense of dread slowly filled him. He couldn’t explain it, but with every step he took, the voice in his head grew louder and louder. And no, it wasn’t the usual voice in his head. That one had a Russian accent.

An inner prompting overrode his logic and told him to turn and walk away.

A hesitation in Anderson’s body language told him the man had a similar feeling.

When they reached a corner in the tunnels, a soft, repetitive clicking emanated from the way ahead. The operative held his fist up and signaled for his companion to stop.

“Hey, so…Anja,” he said, his voice pitched as low as he could. “About those alarms being tripped…”

“What about them?” she asked seriously. She’d obviously sensed the dread in his voice. “If there is some sort of invasive plant species growing down there, it could have compromised the wiring in the tunnel walls.”

“I’m starting to think it was something a little more mobile than your average mushroom colony,” Savage grumbled and fumbled in his suit to draw his pistol. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he knew he didn’t want to meet something that clicked like that. From the sound of it, the whatever it was didn’t want to meet him either. It sounded suspiciously like a rattlesnake’s warning to stay away.

Unfortunately, there was no way for them to get into the Triangle but through…whatever it was, regardless of whether they intruded on its territory or not.

Something cold swept over him as he started to move forward against every warning in his gut telling him not to. Anderson followed close behind, having drawn his own weapon and tucked it over his flashlight. There was no way to know if guns would be necessary, and they would both feel foolish if it turned out to be rats. But feeling foolish was fine if they were alive to do so.

And…well, what they found could be described as some kind of rat. Maybe.

“What the fuck?” he asked.

Anderson didn’t say anything as their flashlight illuminated a creature about the size of a Great Dane. The protruding jaw and elongated incisors along with the grey fur mottled across its back were rat-like, but that was where the similarities ended. The legs were long and attached higher on the body like an insect’s, although there were only four of them. The tail hung over its body with a rattle at the end, which quivered as the clicking grew louder.

“Seriously, what the actual fuck?” Savage said again. The creature looked as surprised to see them as they were to see it, and after a moment during which all three stared at one another, it voiced a screeching roar. The bottom half of its jaw split down the middle to reveal a pair of fangs that seemed to actually elongate as the monster attacked.

“Shit!” Anderson yelled, and Savage raised his weapon and pulled the trigger. The first needle drilled through the creature’s forehead but showed no sign of stopping it. Without even slowing, it barreled across the ten paces or so between them in the tight, claustrophobic tunnels. He squeezed the trigger a few more times and the needles rocketed into the monster’s head over and over with no apparent effect. Anderson’s weapon fired consistently from a few paces behind him, but his bullets proved as ineffectual.

The creature maintained its furious assault and he flung himself to the right to avoid it. The other man dodged left and they cleared enough space for the creature to upend them as it careened past.

Something slashed across his cheek and he recoiled instinctively. The lethal tail whipped past him as he pushed himself around the spindly legs while he maintained his fire. The rounds finally seemed to have an effect and blood had started to flow from its various wounds. Its legs struggled to find purchase on the sludgy ground. The two men maintained their barrage and it finally dropped to screech and roar in distress.

Savage scrambled to his feet and stood over the monster that now writhed in pain. He raised his weapon and pulled the trigger a couple more times, aimed at where he assumed the brain would be, and it fell still.

Chittering from behind him dragged his attention from the dead creature and he spun as a group of smaller versions of the monster hurtled off in the opposite direction. Its young, he supposed in a kind of shocked stupor, and while the mother defended her brood, the offspring themselves would flee the attackers.

Anderson looked oddly at him and narrowed his eyes as he moved to offer a hand to help him up.

“What did you do that for?” he asked as he took his hand and found his feet.

“It was a mercy killing,” he pointed out. He removed the chamber on his pistol to check how many needles he still had in the strip he currently used. It was enough—a good five or six magazines’ worth. “Whatever the fuck that was, it was an animal defending its territory. We needed to go through it to complete our mission, so we did. It doesn’t mean we have to leave it bleeding and dying out here, much less deal with the young.”

Anderson nodded. “I understand that. But…Anja, did you see that?”

“There are no cameras down there, so no,” she replied. “What was it?”

“It looked like a giant crossbreed between a rat and some kind of insect.”

“Don’t forget the tail,” Savage reminded him. “The tail had a rattler like a rattlesnake, and it…” He touched the cut on his cheek.

“Right, the tail. Do you know if any of the Research Triangle projects are dealing with anything from the Zoo? Anything at all?”

“What does this have to do…” Savage started to ask, but he paused. He’d seen the videos. The monsters had always seemed to be a nightmarish form of the animals that lived on earth. If anything could explain what the hell they’d just seen, it was that. "Wait, you're telling me it was a Zoo monster?"

"Well, technically, it was a sewer monster," his boss said. "But the same principle applies, I guess. By that I mean it comes from the same source."

"Oh, shit." He shook his head and dropped to his haunches beside the creature. The blood seeping out from the dozen or so wounds across its body was a dark blue—or maybe purple. The flashlight didn't do a great job of showing it well.

"Oh shit is right," Anderson hissed. "How the fuck are there goop animals in the sewers? In the States?"

"If they were running tests on Zoo stuff, I guess that would explain how," Anja said. "But these places have some secure ways to dispose of waste. You wouldn't simply wash your hands. They went through some rigorous processes to make sure nothing got out."

"Courtney tells me that all it takes is a couple of cells," Anderson grumbled and patted his companion on the back. "One mistake, one guy cutting corners because he had a hot date and a timeline… Considering she's studied this stuff for a while, I'd say she knows her stuff."

"Dr. Monroe knows all the ways this goop can kill us. Got it." Savage pushed up from his examination of the creature. "The fact that we have this stuff out in the wild—and here—has me worried. I thought we were putting all kinds of work into isolating the problem in the Sahara. Knowing that it's all the way out here and simply waiting for a mistake..."

He let his words trail off. He'd seen the kind of monsters people faced in the Zoo. Only videos, of course. From what he'd read on Anderson, the man had a closer look. Dr. Monroe and her Heavy Metal team had far more than that. Even based on the little he knew, having critters like that rushing into heavily populated areas would end badly. Very badly.

"We need to alert these people about what they have growing in their basement," he said as they started to move again. "You know, once we're finished with all this crap. Just make sure their drones come down here with flamethrowers or something and tear this whole place apart. We don't need a Zoo Two: The Zoo goes to Washington situation on our hands."

"Agreed," Anderson said almost under his breath. "For now, though, we need to get through this damned sewer, into the Triangle, get our intel, and get out. So, Anja, do you have any changes on our vector?"

"Nope," she replied. "Keep moving forward and you should reach your destination in about half a mile."

"Let's keep moving. And keep our weapons out in case we run into a daddy rat-insect that doesn't like the fact that we killed mother dearest."