This is one hunt you won’t ever be allowed to brag about, Gonzalez thought. He glanced at his men. Phillips was shining his light over the floor and walls, spatters of blood appearing and disappearing as the beam traveled. Marcelin was standing in the doorway, looking out into the corridor, head cocked as if listening.
“We ready?” Gonzalez asked quietly.
“Hell, yes, we’re ready,” Creel said. “Let’s take this thing down.”
They regrouped just inside the doorway, then moved into the hall. Phillips once again took point, supplementing the faint corridor illumination with slow sweeps of his flashlight, following the bloody, disquietingly large prints. There seemed to be occasional droplets of blood on the floor here, too-drops that had nothing to do with the tracks. Had the creature been wounded somehow?
“Jesus,” he heard Phillips say. “What the hell kind of prints are those?”
The hall dead-ended at an intersection. To the left lay a series of unused and empty offices; to the right, the corridor led to the radar-support spaces. They paused while Phillips carefully shone his light around. The prints were growing less distinct, the droplets of blood less frequent, but they clearly led to the right.
Gonzalez felt his heart sink. The radar-support spaces were a warren of small, equipment-heavy galleries and storage nooks. If the thing was in there, it would be a bitch to flush it out.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Weapons at the ready. Don’t speak unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
He looked at them in turn, lingering briefly on Marcelin. The greenish cast had left the corporal’s face, to be replaced by pallid anxiety.
As they moved forward again, Gonzalez took a quick mental inventory of his own emotions. He realized that he, too, was afraid. Not of being killed or injured-their overwhelming firepower would protect them from that-but of the unknowns this thing they were tracking represented. He remembered the photographer, Toussaint: the way he had raved, shrill and loud and with hardly a break for breath, until sedated. He recalled the panicky edge to Marcelin’s voice, back in the mess. Don’t make me say it…! Gonzalez was simply too old, too set in his ways, to have his understanding of the natural world roughly unseated.
The corridor was a receding rectangle of black, punctuated by pools of yellow light. Phillips kept his flashlight on the tracks while the others licked theirs left and right in loose, unchoreographed patterns. They passed the stairwell leading to C Level and the enlisted men’s quarters, then the set of rooms used for data acquisition and identification. All four doors were closed and showed no signs of tampering, their small metal-grilled windows undamaged.
“Where should we aim?” he heard Creel pipe up, almost eagerly, from behind. “The head? The heart? The guts?”
“Just keep shooting until it falls down,” Gonzalez replied.
Ahead was the narrow opening that led to the radar-support spaces. It was pitch-black. Phillips entered first, sweeping left past the doorway. Gonzalez followed, reaching over and flipping on the lights with the palm of his hand.
Radar support was a series of three large rooms, one after another, all filled with monolithic metal racks arranged in a parallel line-a library of technological obsolescence. The first rack lay directly before them like a wall, its high shelves covered with ancient equipment for radar scanning, acquisition, and interpretation: dark CRT screens, logic boards festooned with vacuum tubes, multicolored tumbleweeds of tangled wire.
“Where does this lead?” Creel whispered.
“Nowhere,” Gonzalez replied. “It’s a cul-de-sac.”
“Sweet. So if the thing’s in here, we’ve got it cornered.”
Nobody answered.
Gonzalez peered along the tall metal casing, looking first left, then right. Then he turned to Phillips and Marcelin. “You two take the right-hand edge,” he said. “And watch your six.”
They nodded, then turned and crept down the narrow space between the wall and the first rack, weapons at the ready.
Gonzalez motioned to Creel. “We’ll go down the left. Meet us at the rear door. If you see anything-anything at all-sing out.”
“Got it.”
Gonzalez walked alongside the storage rack until he reached the left-hand wall of the room. Then he turned the corner quickly, raking the area with his eyes. The end caps of the other storage racks retreated toward the back of the room, the narrow corridors between them dark. To the left, along the wall, were deep niches for additional storage. Gonzalez took a slow breath, then started forward again, glancing down each row of storage racks as he passed it. At the far end of each he could make out the forms of Phillips and Marcelin doing the same, advancing up the right side.
It was the work of a minute to reach the rear of the room. He turned and walked along the back wall until he met up with the others at the doorway leading to the second storage area. “Anything?” he asked.
Phillips shook his head.
Gonzalez nodded. The room had not only looked empty; it had felt empty. Searching radar support began to seem like a waste of time. The creature had probably retreated down the staircase to C Level. Why would it be here, in this dead end?
“Let’s take the next,” he said, reaching through the doorway and snapping on the lights in the room ahead. “Same procedure.”
The second room seemed identical to the first: tall shelves full of long-forgotten equipment. It was as dead as the first room except for a faint humming noise, pitched very low, almost more felt than heard-excess air in the heating system, no doubt. Again, Gonzalez and Creel took the left-hand side, walking slowly and quietly along the storage racks, while the other two took the right. They reached the rear-which thanks to a burned-out bulb was only dimly illuminated-and once again rejoined Phillips and Marcelin at the doorway to the third room.
Gonzalez peered into the blackness ahead. “We’ll check, just to be thorough. Then we’ll go back to stairwell 12 and try C Level. Let’s go, same procedure.”
“Smell that?” Creel asked.
“Smell what?” said Phillips.
“I don’t know. Hamburger or something.”
Gonzalez reached in, snapped on the lights once again. A few fluorescent bulbs flickered into life. Then, seconds later, the nearest one dimmed with a quiet sizzle.
He frowned. Shit. What a time for the ballast to go. Now the distant part of the room lay in half-light, while the area directly ahead of them was shrouded in gloom.
Phillips snorted. “You picked a strange time to be hungry,” he told Creel.
Gonzalez stepped through the doorway, the others following.
“No, man. I didn’t mean cooked hamburger.”
Gonzalez turned to the left, preparing to walk yet again along the storage rack, Creel right behind him. Then he stopped.
Ahead, where the walls met, he could make out the first of several equipment niches. Except this niche didn’t contain the metal-sided radar units he’d observed before. Instead, something lay in the bottom; something that shone dully in the faint light.
“My head hurts,” said Marcelin.
Gonzalez reached for his flashlight, stabbed its beam toward the niche. The light illuminated a twisting of clear plastic, something caked with dried blood inside.
Peters.
At that precise moment, Marcelin began to whimper.
Gonzalez wheeled around. Something was peeping out at them from around the opposite corner of the storage rack. In the brief moment that he saw it, Gonzalez registered a heavy, shaggy pelt of dark hair; a large ear, heart-shaped like a bat’s and set at an angle lateral to the head; and a single yellow eye.
And there was something else. The head was too high, too high off the ground…
There was a roar in his ear as Creel’s grenade launcher exploded. The shell rocketed along the storage case and exploded against a shelf half a dozen feet short of where the head had been. The room shook. Red-and-yellow smoke roiled back toward them and pieces of metal and vacuum-tube glass rained everywhere.