41

Henry closed the doors to the control room and locked them. It was the only way he could be sure of staying alive. He tried not to listen to the screams and yells, but he could not help but hear them, even through the doors, and he could see, through the glass of the control-room observation portal, the creature slowly tearing one of the guards apart. Then it moved on to another man, a convict this time.

Where had it come from? How had it gotten in? Had he simply missed it?

The guards tried to beat it with their truncheons, but it didn’t seem to do much good. The creature just kept on coming. One of them, one of the guards, managed to make it back to the armory and unlock a gun, but when he fired it at the creature it had little effect. It just kept coming at him until it had him in its scythes and was eating away the side of his face. Four or five men were already down. Then another man, a prisoner, plucked up the gun and this time, instead of firing into the creature’s chest, he shot repeatedly at the creature’s leg until it was little more than tattered mass of tissue that gave out as soon as the creature put weight on it. And yet the creature kept coming, dragging itself forward now with the tips of its scythes until the man put enough bullets into the joint connected to the scythe to break it off. Even then, the creature kept coming, crawling like a worm and trying to chew the man’s leg off until one of the others had stamped on it enough times to separate the head from the shoulders. But the torso still moved, as if it were still alive.

So perhaps the only way to stop it is to immobilize it, thought Henry. Cut off the limbs or render them inoperative in some way. Even then, it was still moving, but its ability to attack had been drastically diminished.

The remaining guards and prisoners looked grim and seemed hostile to one another. Eventually, they took the bodies of the dead and put them in a line against one wall.

So the creature was dead, thought Henry. Locking the doors of the control room to keep everybody else out had been premature. They had survived.

He was just preparing to open the door when a wave of pain swept through his head. He grimaced, nearly fainted, and for a moment he could see, standing just beside him, as real as he had ever been when he was alive, his grandfather.

“Papa?” he said.

But it could not be his grandfather. His grandfather had been dead for years. The man, whoever he was, simply smiled and nodded, then reached out to pat his hand. Very slowly he began to fade, vanishing into nothingness.

Henry shook his head to clear it. He was hearing sounds from below, but, still confused, wasn’t sure what exactly he was hearing. When he stood up and went to the window he saw that another of the batlike creatures had appeared in the place of a corpse, and that it was huddled over the corpse next to it pumping something into its skull. By the time it moved on to the next corpse in line, the first corpse had already started to shudder and change. Soon the fighting started up again.

It was terrible to watch, but Henry had a hard time looking away. At the end, nearly all of the creatures were dead, but all of the humans were dead, too, and the room was scattered with corpses. Which was not good, thought Henry. Because the next time a burst came, perhaps these corpses would start walking around. And now he was perhaps the only human left alive.

*   *   *

He tried to place a call to the commander, but got no response. What was wrong? Maybe someone or something was jamming the circuit, he thought, or maybe they simply weren’t answering.

He placed a distress call on a general circuit and sent it out, hoping someone would hear it and would send help.

But the signal didn’t last long. After just a few minutes it went dead. He tried to send it out again, but it was being jammed. He was working on it, trying to figure out how it was being jammed and who was behind it, when a vidlink opened and showed him a picture of the commander’s face. He had a stern expression on his face.

“Do you need something?” he asked. “We’re a little busy here.”

When Henry quickly filled him in on the situation, Commander Grottor simply nodded.

“Things have gone wrong at the other sites as well, all at once,” he said, and Henry noticed for the first time that though his expression was stern his eyes were tired and a little puzzled. “God only knows what we’ve unleashed,” he said.

“Sir, what other sites? Are we a site? What does it mean that we’re a site?”

“Hmmm?” he said. “Oh, you’re at the penal colony. Of course. You don’t know anything about that.”

“What’s going on, sir?” Henry asked.

But the commander said, “I’m sorry, son, but we had to jam your signal. We can’t have anyone stumbling onto this. We need to bring it to an end. It needs to end here.”

“But you’ve got to get us out of here,” said Henry. “Or me, at least. I may be the only one left alive.”

The commander shook his head. “There are bigger things at stake here than your life. I’m afraid you’re already as good as dead,” he said, and then broke the link.