We descended deep underground. Ten of us packed into a brightly lit elevator, smooth jazz coming from speakers above us, a jarring anachronism that left me unsettled. Gonzo had stayed above with the rest of the men. Max kept his pistol pressed against Paul's kidney as the elevator took us down noiselessly and smoothly with no sense of speed or direction beyond a vague sense of vertigo.
Paul had led us to a recessed control panel, pressed some buttons, and the heavy elevator doors had opened before us. The complex, he helpfully explained on our thirty second ride down, had its own nuclear reactor and vast stockpiles of food. The labs were completely secure and isolated to ensure that “nothing escaped.”
The elevator doors snicked open, revealing a barren space with a concrete floor and a massive set of blast doors, the kind of Cold War engineering designed to withstand a direct nuclear blast.
Max prodded Paul and we exited the elevator. The soldiers stood alertly in the confines of the empty room. Paul walked to another control panel set into the wall and tapped on the illuminated keypad, chattering as he did so. I watched over his shoulder as he typed.
“They forced us to be here,” he said. “Gideon is a bad man. He took our families, our women and children, and made us come here.” The door made a hissing sound, and then pulled apart. It separated into two halves, each receding into the wall, and I saw that it was over a foot thick, built of solid steel. Beyond it was a short, narrow corridor, and yet another metal door, not as imposing as the blast door, though still substantial.
“The labs are just past here,” Paul said. “The docs will be glad to see you, I can tell you that. You're liberators.” We stepped into the antechamber and the blast doors ground shut behind us.
I cut my eyes at Max and he answered with a slight nod, kept his pistol on Paul's back.
Paul placed his eye onto the console and a red light scanned his retina. There was a whirring and a click from the door.
“And if you're hungry,” Paul said, “the cafeteria serves up some pretty good grub.” He chuckled to himself as he reached out and turned the handle. I was feeling lightheaded. Perhaps it was the light, this alien space. Something was nagging at me.
“They've got whole freezers full of Italian food. When's the last time you had lasagna? I mean there's—”
Paul spun and struck Max's hand with the speed of a rattlesnake. Max fired, his weapon and arm were knocked downward, and the shot was deafening in the confined space. The lights went out and we were plunged into total darkness.
I heard the door shut. Paul had escaped.
“Masks on!” I said, fumbling about and finally finding the mask tethered around my neck. I placed it over my face, felt the seal, and breathed deeply.
“That little bitch is gassing us,” Max swore. “Something non-lethal to slow us down, some kind of security measure he triggered.”
I produced a small flashlight from my belt, screwed it underneath the barrel of my weapon while the other men did the same. We were trapped, the blast doors leading to the elevator behind us hopelessly locked.
“We're gonna have to breach this door and go deeper into the labs. We can't get past those blast doors,” Max said.
“Hold on,” I said. “Let me try the code he used.” I walked to the blast doors, opened the keypad and typed the ten digit sequence I'd memorized while Max shone a light on it. The light turned green, but the door did not open.
“It wants a retinal scan,” Max said.
“We've gotta go in,” I said. “Guys, put some plastique on that door. Let's blow it.” I had a headache, whether from the gunshots, adrenaline, or from the gas, I do not know.
The breaching team put plastic explosives on the door and we retreated to the far corner of the room as the charges blew. We kept our weapons pointed at the doorway. When the door shuddered open, the team tossed flash bang grenades through the entrance, then advanced into the darkness beyond. They, at least had night vision goggles.
Seconds later, one of them shouted “Clear!” We entered the next room.
A klaxon blared urgently in rhythm to a flashing red light mounted over another door. The room was large, perhaps two thousand square feet. I swept the perimeter with my weapon, the light casting a weak circle at the edges. I was reminded of my mother's law office in Miami; there was a long desk where a receptionist with a bored smile might sit asking the reason for your visit, a comfortable looking couch, and wooden tables and chairs. The floor was hardwood, or laminate made to look that way, and had the room been lit, it might have been warm and pleasant.
“This is bizarre,” Max said. “All right, let's move out.”
The next door was unlocked. The breaching team sped through it into a sterile, white floored hallway with offices branching off from it. The lights were on there, harsh and florescent. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the sudden brightness and the men first through the door swore when the light assaulted their eyes through the NVGs. There was fresh blood on the floor, very red against the almost blinding white, but there was not a great deal of it. Paul had been wounded, but apparently not enough to make him bleed out.
We cleared the offices, which were small and lifeless spaces devoid of character, with nothing about them to indicate the kind of creatures that had once occupied the desks and chairs, no lingering fingerprints of humanity left behind, like photographs or artwork.
We swept through more empty hallways and offices, never knowing what the next door might reveal, but there was a sameness to all of it. There were manuals stacked on bookshelves and dead computer screens, the occasional suit jacket left on a chair, the odd tie on a desk next to a Styrofoam cup. The place had a forlorn and abandoned feel to it, as though it had not been touched by human hands for millennia, and we were archaeologists peering into the past, searching ancient history for clues. There was an uncomfortable, invasive feeling about our exploration, the way you might feel if you walked over a grave, a sense of violation that makes your skin prickle and tingle. Had I known the evil that lay below, perhaps I would not have felt that way. The alarm continued to scream and my head continued to ache.
*
I was disappointed to discover that the next elevator only went down. We crammed inside for a short ride further into the depths of the underground labyrinth. I was hungry and thirsty and tired of the constant press of stress constricting my temples. If stress had a sound, it was that of a raw klaxon alarm which someone probably designed for that very purpose. I was jumpy and on edge and felt like my whole body was vibrating when the elevator doors opened to darkness and screams.
Armed with sub machine guns and shotguns, the breaching team spread out into the vast room, which had glass partitions, desks, lab tables, beakers, and a bewildering array of electronics. I moved up the center aisle, stepping around metal stools, glass crunching beneath my boots. The mask diminished my peripheral vision, and I constantly swept my head from side to side, feeling watched and vulnerable.
Ahead and far to my right, a shot gun boomed twice. Moments later, my eyes caught movement, and something was hurtling toward me low and fast. Gonzo shot it before I could react.
It was a pig.
Somewhere in the distance, a woman shrieked, plaintive and wet and full of fear and pain. It was the sound of slaughter.
Our lights played over the dead animal. I observed that it was pink and fat in the way well-kept pigs are, but that it had a six-inch stalk, a thin black unicorn protuberance growing from the top of its skull. There were shouts and screams from beyond.
“Hold your fire,” I heard. “We've got civilians.” I looked forward and from the darkness, white shapes formed and took on resolution. Our soldiers returned with a group of terrified men and women wearing white coats. One of them wore a full body haz-mat suit, with sealed gloves and plastic enclosing his head, an oxygen tank on his back. From the rear of the group, out of my sight, I heard one of the light machine guns spraying.
“Thank God you found us,” said a handsome woman with glasses. She was perhaps in her early fifties, with dirty blond hair shot with gray, and there was fear in her eyes, without the frothing panic visible on the faces of her comrades. “My name is Dr. Schott. Jane.” She pointed past me, her eyebrows raised and lines on her forehead. “Is this it?”
Maybe it was a trick of the dark, but her hand seemed preternaturally old and withered. A just consequence, I would later reflect, for the things her hands had done, as if they stored up the evil they had touched while the rest of her was allowed to age normally.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Is this all of you?”
“For now, yeah.”
Max was shouting orders to the men, who were knocking over desks and forming a barricade. One of the shotguns fired again, the muzzle flash bright orange in the dark room.
“You're from the Alliance, right?”
“What are we up against?” I asked her.
“Someone overrode our safety protocols. They opened the pens.”
I had a pretty good idea of who that someone was. “We're all scientists. I'm a bio-engineer. You didn't bring enough guns.”
“Why is that? And can you take us to the surface?”
“Ha!” she barked.
“That's funny?”
“We haven't been topside for almost a decade. Most of us anyway. There are a few newcomers who managed to get kidnapped and brought here.”
“We're gonna have to figure out a way out. We don't know the layout. If you want to live you will have to help us. Now tell me what is going on. The quick version.”
“Reloading!” I heard. The gunfire had gotten more intense. I crouched behind an overturned steel desk next to Dr. Schott.
“The experiments are loose,” she said. “A lot of them. Somebody opened some of the doors manually, others via the operating system. Someone who had the codes to do it. None of us have the codes. We've been prisoners down here.”
“What kind of experiments?”
“Different kinds,” she said. “But the ones we have to worry about are those.” She pointed to the pig with the thing growing out of its head. “Cordyceps fungus genetically engineered to infect mammals. You see that stalk? When that bursts, which it will in a matter of days or hours, it will release microscopic spores into the air. It's how it reproduces. The spores then infect another host's lungs. This particular strain is some kind of mutation we encountered less than a year ago. The toxins released into the host of the brain during the last stages reduce cognitive function, while increasing adrenaline. We think it's a mechanism designed to make the host more active and spread the spores, and it makes the hosts highly aggressive.”
More gunshots from up ahead. I looked over the desk. I could only see dancing flashlights.
“You've gotta see this,” someone said.
“So how do we get out of here?” I asked Dr. Schott.
“There is the elevator you came in on. But you need one of the base commanders with you. I don't see the Gestapo, so we're out of luck there. There is another way some of us tried years ago, an air intake shaft but it was guarded and booby trapped. Everybody who tried never came back. I lost my husband like that.”
“Take us to the shaft,” I said.
“We need to get masks,” she said. “I don't suppose you'd give me a gun?”
“Not a chance,” I told the woman with the old hands.
We made our way down the corridor, pausing at the door at the rear of the room, which the soldiers had closed. In front of it was a group of twisted corpses. They were naked and pathetic, eyes staring vacantly and mouths clenched in toothy grins. They all had stalks growing from their heads of various lengths, and some also had the telltale Tarantula hairs on their faces.
“You were experimenting on people?” I said. I was at the edge of reason, teetering on a plunge into blind rage. I felt my muscles jumping and twitching unbidden.
“We had no choice,” the woman said. “The commanders forced us to do it.”
“Let's move out,” I said. “How far to the air shaft?”
“It'll take us maybe an hour, maybe more,” she said. “And we were trying to find a cure.” Her voice had gotten small. “There is another lab at the end of a corridor to the right. There should be masks there for us.”
“All right,” I said. “You and your people stay at the rear. If anybody bolts, tries to reach for a computer, or grabs for a weapon, you will all die.” I nodded to Max and he silently circled around to guard our rear.
I switched weapons with one of the men to give him a break and to put myself up front, kicking myself for not adjusting my load before I had gone down. The HK was not suited to the kind of close quarters combat we were in the midst of. I hefted the shotgun and racked it, a satisfying sound in the dark.
I opened the door, stepping over more bodies. One of them was a female in a lab coat with her neck torn and at an odd angle; it looked as if she had been attacked by a wild animal.
We retrieved the masks for the doctors, and encountered another group of scientists behind barricaded doors, huddled together like terrified rabbits.
We continued deep into the underground compound, rife with carnage and screams and gunfire.
A woman, naked and pale with willowy blonde hair came clawing at me from a recess in a hallway. She would have been beautiful if her eyes were not full of rage and there had not been a long alien stalk of fungus coming from the middle of her forehead.
Perhaps because she was a woman, or perhaps because she was so close, I did not fire, but swung my shotgun like a club. I hit her hard in the jaw, a blow which should have dropped a strong man instantly, yet still she came, a guttural growl in her throat. I hit her again and she collapsed. I stepped over her and then I heard the shot that killed her and it made me wince inside.
My flashlight danced over a menagerie of horrors as we wound through the laboratories. There were glass tanks lining walls in some of them containing human heads floating in amber liquid, dark passages we did not go down where I heard whimpering and crying, perhaps animal, perhaps human. We crept past one section of rooms where humans lay dead on steel tables, their chests torn open for autopsy. One of them had been far along in her pregnancy, her belly pale and protruding. It is just one of those things I wish I could un-see.
I found myself praying.
I have seen evil before, faced it down and fought back with muscle and grit, and I have felt fear and terror more than once. I have feared for my children, my men, and people I love, and I have seen wickedness in the eyes of some men.
This was something worse, and the scale of depravity made me weak and sick. I wanted to weep for all mankind. There was a heavy malevolence all around me with a weight to it. I could feel it pressing against me, and my mask and my clothing could not shield me from its presence. I feel a chill thinking of it now and a reluctance to ever speak of it, lest I somehow conjure what I felt underground into existence and make it real again.
The air shaft had steel bars over it, but our explosives blasted through. We labored upward through miles of living rock at a sharp angle. The tunnel was large enough to drive a Hummer through, a long, hollow cylinder which must have taken a massive amount of labor and heavy equipment to form. After several hours, a pinprick of daylight greeted us, and I forced myself not to move too quickly. We had passed desiccated bodies and trip wires connected to fragmentation grenades and more than one claymore mine. All of these things slowed our progress.
There was urgency to escape, and to seal off the compound completely. I was terribly thirsty and exhausted by the time we reached the final barrier.
Twin fans with propeller sized blades spun lazily in front of us. Using the last of our explosives, we blew one of them and stepped from the earth and into the fading light of day on a rocky hillside. One of the men began removing his mask.
“No!” I said.
“We've got spores all over us,” Dr. Schott said. “There's a decontamination wash at one of the surface labs.”
I grabbed the man by his shoulders and put my mask up to his. Through the clear plastic he looked like a horse spooked by a bear, eyes white and full of blind panic.
“I can't breathe,” he said. His voice was ragged.
“Focus soldier,” I said. “We're almost outta this mess.”
I understood why he felt that way. I yearned to feel the sun on my face and take a long breath of sweet desert air. I felt unclean and polluted, as though my soul had been dragged through toxic waste and bits of foul tar were clinging to me. I wanted to be baptized, submerged in a clear river wearing white and feel the love of God pouring out on me and washing me clean.
We hiked down the hillside, over the barren desert back to the main compound. Chilli landed in a helicopter, but I waved him off, shouting over the rotor wash that we would meet him later. We couldn't risk contaminating him or the helo.
I had not slept in more than thirty-six hours, and the sleep deprivation, lack of water, and combat fatigue had left me shaky and numb.
The walk felt like purgatory, a kind of purging in it, penitence for our collective sins, and although I wanted fresh air and a shower, I did not mind the hike so much, felt that it was important somehow, that with each stride I was leaving evil further behind me and defeating it with distance, finding triumph over it with the glory of the desert sunset full of color and hope.
There was a war to win, and the stakes had become very clear.