Holes in the Ground (13 page)

Rimmer nodded, he unfolded his arms and put them at his sides. “All I’m saying, sir, is that if we go into things with the best of intentions—to gain Intel—and something
unforeseen
happens, well, then nobody has anything to feel guilty about. Shit happens, as they say.”

Kane leaned back in his chair and nodded. “You know that there are more of those things? The faustlings, I mean. We have over a dozen of them at our other facilities.”

Rimmer nodded. “I know.”

“You do? How?”

“I have my sources. It pays to know people working at other facilities. It can give a heads up on any potential issues that may arise.”

Kane was getting a little irritated by his staff knowing things above their pay grade, but he supposed in Rimmer’s case it was acceptable. It was the man’s job to know things. “Then you understand that we need to learn more about these things. They’re planning something.”

“With all due respect, sir. I think the most important thing to learn about the faustling things is how to kill them. Perhaps putting the Manx man in with our own faustling will shine some light on how to achieve said termination.”

Kane thought about it and nodded his head at Rimmer. “Get it done. But get it done safely.”

“Of course.”

“And keep an eye on the Dennison-Joneses, and that English pest.”

“I’m on top of it, General. When was the last time we had a problem?”

General Kane frowned. “We haven’t had one in a long time. That’s what concerns me. I think we’re overdue.”

Andy was standing with Sun and Dr. Gornman as two of Rimmer’s men appeared in the hallway of subbasement 5 with a thick roll of steel mesh. Rimmer was with them, and broke away to talk to Andy.

“This is the best I could come up with at short notice. We’ll get the mesh secured through the center of the cell, but if either of them has more strength than they’re letting on, they may get through.”

Andy looked in at Lucas in his cell. The man didn’t seem particularly strong, but it was impossible to know for certain. “Okay, we’ll just have to hope for the best.”

“This cannot go wrong,” Dr. Gornman said. “General Kane won’t tolerate us making a mess of this. More to the point, neither will I.”

“Doing a wee spot of decorating, are we?” Lucas said, sitting inside his cell. “I wouldn’t mind a splash of cerise on these walls. Breathes a bit of life to a room, so it does.”

Andy went up to the glass. “You’re going to get a roommate. Can we trust you to behave while we get things ready?”

Lucas glanced around his tiny cell and huffed. “Hope this new fella isn’t going to take up a lot of room. Can nay swing a cat as it is.”

“The space you have is perfectly sufficient,” Gornman said. “And let me remind you that you placed yourself in there.”

“Aye, that I did, lass. ‘Twas your bright smile that lured me here.”

Gornman’s face remained stony.

“See?” Lucas said. “How could any man resist you?”

Rimmer nodded at Andy. “You ready?”

Andy nodded back.

Rimmer went over to the LED touchscreen beside Lucas’s cell and placed his thumb against it. He prodded through the menus and then typed in a passcode on the screen.

Suddenly there was a sharp hissing sound.

Andy turned to look into Lucas’s cell and saw that an amber substance was being pumped into the air from the ceiling. It quickly dissipated and mixed with the room’s existing atmosphere.

Lucas glanced upwards and frowned. “Did someone just let a cheeky fart loose in here?”

Then he began to cough and splutter, clutching at his throat.

“He’s fighting it,” said Rimmer. “Just give it a minute.”

They gave it a minute. Lucas dropped down to his knees, spat a wad of phlegm on the floor and started heaving.

Then he glanced up at them all and began chuckling. He straightened up and got back to his feet. “You’ll need something a wee bit stronger than gnat’s piss to put me down. I once smoked reefer with Bob Marley. Not a fat lot else has been able to touch me since.”

Andy’s shoulders slumped. Sun, who had remained silent throughout the last several minutes, came up beside him and shook her head. “We might have expected as much. His anatomy is a mystery, so why should we assume that he’s going to have a nervous system we can exploit with basic chemistry?”

Andy sighed. “So what should we do?”

“We should call it off,” Gornman said. “If we don’t have an effective plan of action then we need to go away until we come up with one. Mistakes are made by acting without proper thought or appropriate reflection.”

Lucas pressed his hands up against the glass and started mumbling something. His eyes rolled back in his head.

“What is he doing?” Sun asked her husband.

“I don’t know.”

Lucas’s words became louder. “…pen sesame. Open sesame… OPEN SESAME.”

The glass wall sprung aside on its rails, leaving Lucas’s cell wide open. The Manx man stood in the newly opened gap and grinned at them all. “Neat trick, huh? Of course, nothing beats a good bit of card magic, but a bit of variety never hurt anybody.”

Rimmer immediately signalled his men, who pointed their assault rifles at Lucas. Rimmer was only carrying a sidearm—what looked like a Glock—but he quickly pulled it from its holster and aimed. “Don’t move!”

Lucas held his hands up. “Come now, I’m just being helpful. You folks wanted to come inside, so now I’ve opened the door for you.”

“Get down on the floor,” Rimmer demanded.

“Such bad manners. These are my digs, not yours. I suggest you stop with the threats, fella. That heroic beard of yours ain’t fooling nobody.”

Rimmer took a step forward and gripped his handgun tighter, his knuckles growing white. “I don’t make threats,
fella
.”

Lucas chuckled. “Look out! We got ourselves a badass over here. I wonder how much of a badass you were when you were bleeding out into the sand of the Iraqi desert. You know that Lewis’s mother killed herself after she got the news that her son had died? You must feel really bad about that.”

Rimmer snarled and seemed very ready to shoot.

“Okay…” Andy spread his hands. “Let’s everybody calm down.”

“That sounds like a wise idea,” Lucas said, keeping his eyes on Rimmer and grinning slightly.

“Lucas? Will you let Rimmer and his men install a fence inside your cell? Will you try anything?”

“Not if he stops glaring at me with those beady little peepers of his.”

Andy turned to face Rimmer. “Rimmer?”

Rimmer kept his pistol up but glanced sideways at Andy. “I’m not about to trust this guy for a minute.”

“Then we have a problem,” Andy said. “Because he doesn’t seem to be all that bothered by your gun, and I would very much prefer that you didn’t shoot him.”

Rimmer lowered his gun by an inch, held it a second longer, and then lowered it all the way. “Fine, but if this guy even scratches his nose funny he’s getting a bullet right in the skull.”

“You can try it,” Lucas said. “Better men than you have. Then, when you fail, I’ll come out there and tie your limbs in knots and use you as a skipping rope. That isn’t a threat, neither.”

“You make it sound like you’ve done something like that before, Lucas,” Sun said.

He glanced at Sun. “That, and much worse, lass. We all have pasts. Living with oneself is a full time job. You have to learn to forgive your mistakes, and work hard not to make the same ones.” Then Lucas levelled his eyes at Rimmer. “But nobody is perfect. Anyone can backslide, even with the best of intentions. That be what the road to hell is paved with, they say. Now kindly order your men to stand down, before my intentions darken.”

They had a brief staring contest, then Rimmer gave a nod and the automatic weapons were lowered.

Andy blew out a breath. “Okay, now that the pissing contest is over, can we get started?”

Lucas nodded politely, and stepped to the side, bidding them entrance. Rimmer instructed his men, who quickly got moving with the thick roll of steel mesh. Another couple of guys appeared with some steel rods and a power drill. By the time five minutes had passed they had drilled and bolted the steel rods to the left and right walls of the cell and secured the mesh fence to them both. Lucas leaned against the back wall and was now trapped behind the mesh while the front of the cell was left open.

“Will the glass wall go back into place?” Sun asked.

Rimmer nodded. “It’s attached to runners. It will slide back into place once I log out of the cell’s control panel. We’re all set to move the other prisoner. You ready?”

Andy felt a lump form in his throat as he contemplated moving the batling out of its cell. The nightmare of Samhain came rushing back to him, and for a moment he was frozen to the spot.

Sun placed a hand on Andy’s back and rubbed.

Andy swallowed a lump in his throat and then spoke. “We’re ready, Rimmer. Get it done fast. Lucas may have been cooperative, but I assure you that the batling won’t be.”

Rimmer nodded and got to work. “Handler, log in and gas the cell.”

The security guard, Handler, nodded obediently before logging into the system as commanded.

Rather than holster his pistol, Rimmer kept it at his side, pointed at the floor. “We’ve all done this before,” he said. “It’s a routine crate job. Soon as the target is out, we move in and secure it.”

The men who had installed the steel mesh fence left momentarily and then returned with a large metal cage on casters.

“Okay, we’re a go,” said Rimmer.

Handler released the sleeping gas into the batling’s cell.

The batling smacked itself into the glass, leaving a bloody smear and making Andy jump.

“Trying toooo kill meeeeeeee?”

“Only a quick nap,” Andy said. “We have someone we want you to meet.”

Bub’s wings began to slow, and the act of staying airborne seemed to grow more difficult.

“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet?”

The batling tried to stay airborne but its wings moved as if they were mired in clay. After a few feeble flaps it dropped out of the air and thumped to the floor.

“Okay,” Rimmer shouted. “Move, move!”

Handler typed in the command for the glass barrier to slide away and the two other guards rushed into the cell. They threw a thick blanket over the top of the subdued batling and grabbed a hold of it. Together they managed to heave the batling upwards and started waddling backwards out of the cell. Handler left the control panel and stood beside the metal crate, holding the lid wide open.

“Quickly,” Rimmer said. “The gas took it down topside, but I don’t want to take any chances here.”

Rimmer’s men readjusted their grip on the blanket-wrapped batling and hurried their pace towards the open crate.

“Just dump it in,” Handler ordered, still holding the lid open.

The two men forced the batling into the crate and stepped back, panting. The creature was obviously heavier than it looked.

Handler shoved the lid closed with a
BANG!
and then locked the latch.

“Finally!” said Dr. Gornman. “I was beginning to doubt that you people could even—”

The crate’s lid sprung back open, smashing Handler in the sternum and sending him backward. The man hit the floor, wheezing.

The hair on the back of Andy’s neck prickled.

Oh, shit!

The batling shook off the blanket and leapt into the air, its wings flapping with renewed vitality.

“Take it down!” Rimmer ordered.

Andy reached for his wife, tugging her away from the ensuing gunfire. A nanosecond later the hallway erupted into deafening pops of automatic weapons.

Bub was riddled with bullets and his maw opened in a screech as blood rained down on everyone. The creature splatted to the floor, right next to Sun and Andy, reaching out a claw and slashing at Sun’s leg.

The gunfire stopped—Rimmer’s men were obviously trained well enough to not shoot with civilians next to the target—and Andy kicked Bub in the side of the head while pulling Sun away. Rimmer stood over the creature and emptied the Glock into Bub’s head, blowing away most of the batling’s skull and face.

Bub’s shredded wings fluttered, then went still.

“Drag it to the cell!” Rimmer ordered. “Now!”

As Rimmer and his men attended to Bub, Andy stared at Sun and saw her gripping the pulsing wound in her calf.

“Artery,” Sun said, her eyes going wide. She dropped onto her butt.

“Your belt,” Gornman told Andy. “Make a tourniquet. We need to get her into surgery, immediately.”

Andy undid his belt with shaking hands, and as he looped it around Sun’s thigh he made the mistake of looking at her wound, seeing bone peek out through the split muscle fibers. The blood continued to gush. So much blood.

Is that all hers? It can’t be. Such a small woman can’t bleed that much.

As Dr. Gornman cinched the belt tight, Andy knelt next to his wife, cradling her head. “It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.”

Further down the hallway was the
whoosh
of Lucas’s cell door closing. They’d dragged Bub inside and locked him in. Andy had no doubt the demon—even though it was missing most of its head—was still alive.

“What the hell is going on here?” Kane shouted like a drill sergeant as he marched towards them from the direction of the elevator. His red cheeks looked ready to pop. “Who is responsible for this goddamn mess?”

Nobody answered.

Rimmer’s men had fetched a gurney and taken Sun up to the Spiral’s infirmary on level 3. The floor also acted as a warehouse. Men in work overalls shared the corridors with doctors and nurses.

Andy sat outside the operating room that a pair of nurses had rushed Sun into. Dr. Gornman had quickly followed, but it had been over an hour since Andy had heard anything.

I can’t lose you, Sun. Nothing would make any sense without you.

The sound of someone hurrying down the hall made Andy glance up from his thoughts. Jerry was racing towards him with a panicked look on his face. The young historian, Nessie, was right beside him.

“We heard your wife has been injured,” Jerry said. “Is she okay?”