Instinct (2010) (28 page)

‘Jesus fuck me Christ,’ he muttered, crossing himself. ‘That is a big sonofabitch.’

‘OK. I’m headin’ on,’ Garrett whispered. As each member of the group filed past, they felt grateful that the direct beam of Garrett’s torch had gone on ahead. It left the arachnid near invisible in black-grey gloom. However, from the illumination of the nearest blue light they could tell that its legs were as wide as their arms, and that sent hard shivers of revulsion rippling through them.

Still the group continued to make its steady progress through the Abdomen, and still there was no sign of life. There were plenty of signs of death, but by now Garrett had come across so many dessicated insect corpses she had stopped mentioning them. The disruption to the group was taking its toll, so she tried to give each one a wide berth instead.

If she had had the time or the light to examine what they were walking over, she’d have seen how small piles of human bones had collected beneath the various dead insects. As their bodies had decomposed, the undigested ribs, skulls and limbs had slipped through the stomach lining and out on to the floor.

Those bones were the most troublesome obstacles they came across. Hidden in the dark, they were easily stepped on, causing some of the group to lose their
footing and sometimes their balance, sending them flailing into clumsy, ignorant panic.

About halfway across the main hall, George trod on a femur and rolled backwards. The fright came over him like a white sheet, and he cried out, sending whips of fear slicing into the others.

Losing his balance, he reached out and grabbed hold of Wainhouse, bringing them down together. Wainhouse was unable to stop himself lurching backwards and tensing his trigger finger to fire off a volley of netspreaders towards the ceiling.

The explosions added to the terrified confusion. Garrett tried to illuminate the scene with her torch, but the moving shadows only suggested more possible horrors.

Meanwhile, the nets floated down from the ceiling, landing softly on top of Laura, Bishop and Wainhouse, who immediately assumed they were under attack from colossal web-shooting spiders.

Laura screamed, leaving Andrew terrified. The more she tried to disentangle herself, the more caught up she became. Her struggle made the thin adhesive cling even tighter, wrapping her hair and fingers together until she screamed again.

Webster and Wainhouse were deep in their own panicked confusion, but they soon recognized the distinctive odour of the netspreaders’ adhesive and realized what had happened.

‘Hey! Hey! Laura, Laura, Laura. Calm down, it’s not insects. It’s the nets from Wainhouse’s gun. They fired
accidentally.’ Webster tried to find her and hold her by the shoulders, but he was also trapped in the nets, so he could only knock into her, poking out another shriek.

Andrew had heard Webster, though, and he did his best to get his mum’s attention. ‘It’s all right, Mum,’ he said, squeezing her hand. ‘Major Webster says it’s all right. Shhhh.’ She was breathing hard, but understood what her son was telling her.

Garrett’s torch confirmed that they were nets from Wainhouse’s gun, but by then the fear and disorientation had left the group at a high pitch of terror.

‘OK, everyone,’ said Carter, loud and hard, ‘I’m going to use the adhesive solution on these nets, so I need calm for the next five minutes.’ His words brought everyone into line instantly, putting a stop to the random movements and desperate gasps that were fuelling each other.

Carter removed an aerosol from his backpack and got to work on Laura. Garrett held her torch up to help, and the others stood in silence. The task provided a welcome distraction, giving them a focus and a feeling that, if they had time to sort out something as small as this, the danger could not be so great as they feared.

Laura, Webster and Wainhouse were soon free of the nets, and a calm descended upon the group.

As they stood gathered around Garrett’s torchlight, Webster spoke quietly but clearly:

‘OK, everybody, it doesn’t look like we’ve disturbed anything, or maybe there’s nothing to disturb. Judging by how long we’ve been walking, we must be nearly at
the other side, so let’s get moving again and see if we can find the stairs.’

A darkness loomed over them as they moved towards the far wall. There were no lights on that side of the Abdomen, so they could not know for sure they were in the right place.

Webster took Garrett’s position at the front and stepped forward to the wall, casting the concentric circles of torchlight across it.

‘Hmmm …’ he grunted. By now it was clear to Laura that he was not a man of excessive reaction.
Hmmm
could mean a serious disaster if said in the wrong way, and Webster’s tone did not fill anyone with confidence.

‘Bishop, you might want to take a look at this.’

Bishop made his way through the group, who stood in single file, forced into that formation by the partition wall of a lab and a dense collection of broken furniture.

Now they were all looking in the same direction as Webster, trying to work out what concerned him.

He pointed the torch upwards. To the group’s disappointment, it definitely wasn’t showing a smooth wall with a conveniently placed door through which they could all exit to freedom. Instead it illuminated a layer of something coarse and coffee-brown, riddled with holes large enough to fit a Labrador.

Webster was rubbing the rough surface. It felt like pumice stone.

‘Wasps?’ asked Bishop.

Webster shook his head. ‘Did we ever have termites down here?’ he asked quietly.

‘I think so,’ said Bishop, peering a short distance into the nearest hole. ‘Masters of destroying whatever comes their way, as long as they can build their nest,’ he said.

‘That’s a termite nest?’ asked George, who had been eavesdropping on Webster and Bishop’s conversation.

He moved forward to see for himself. ‘But termite nests in their natural habitat can be hundreds of times the size of the insect itself. This could be a mile high.’

‘If it’s a mile high, then it’s through the surface, and I think we’d have heard something about that,’ replied Bishop.

‘Think so?’ asked Mike. ‘The jungle we’re in has no people for miles around and plenty of places for whatever built this nest to hide.’

‘No,’ said Laura. ‘If a nest of termites this big got out into that jungle, they’d have laid it to waste in a week. Something must have stopped them.’

She realized as she said it that she was sliding something unpleasant into all their thoughts: something had taken on these termites and won.

‘Well, thanks a bunch for the insect lesson,’ said Wainhouse, in his dull voice. ‘What matters here ain’t whatever killed these critters, ’cos it don’t look to me like there’s much of anything alive down here. What we’ve got to figure out is how to get through this to the stairs and get the hell out of here.’

‘Yes, but the problem is whether we can get through this at all. It’s obviously grown over the lights, so it might also be built around the stairs. That may mean our way to the surface is blocked,’ said Takeshi.

‘What about going up inside it?’ said Laura. Bishop squatted down and looked into the nest. ‘Come on,’ she continued. ‘If there’s nothing alive down here, what danger is there to getting inside this thing, seeing how far it goes up and whether it connects to the stairs?’

One by one, they all looked to Garrett. Eventually, she noticed.

‘Oh, I get it. Yes, I do all the crazy, scary shit, plus I’m a short-ass. Fine.’ She undid her belt to remove her weapons and body armour. ‘You can stop me anytime if I’m getting the wrong idea here.’

No one stopped her.

‘Right, I’ll take that as a “Get your sorry grunt ass up one of those holes ’cos we’re either too big or too clever to do it ourselves.” No fuckin’ problem, amigos.’

Within a minute, she was down to a dirty vest, khaki cargo pants and her army-issue boots. Although she wasn’t entirely visible, what light there was seemed to be catching a side of her no one had noticed before. Despite himself, George felt the stirrings of the world’s most pointless erection.

‘Which hole you think’s a goer?’ she asked anyone who might have an opinion. No opinion came, so Garrett chose the one closest to her. It didn’t leave a lot of room, but whatever problems the size caused, she was soon out of sight.

While Garrett explored, Susan, Lisa and Mike examined the nest, knocking and scraping it.

‘I don’t want to meet whatever made this,’ said Mike.

‘If they were as devastating as regular termites at this size, it would have taken napalm to stop them,’ Lisa mused.

Suddenly, a hollow scraping noise made them all look up in fear.

Webster drew his semi-automatic Walther P99 from its holster. The acoustics made it hard to tell which hole the noise was coming from.

‘Someone get the torch pointed at this thing!’ he snapped.

As the scratching got louder, Webster aimed the muzzle at one hole then another. It was soon obvious where the noise was coming from. Webster stood poised and cocked his weapon until …

‘Fuck me, that must be what a rattlesnake’s shit feels like,’ coughed Garrett, dragging herself out of the nest. Webster lowered his gun and helped her.

‘Stinks like month-old manure up there, like it ain’t been aired since forever.’

‘That’s probably the case,’ said Bishop, trying not to sound too patronizing.

‘Anyway,’ Garrett continued, ignoring him, ‘there’s only so far I can get. The tunnels are an OK size, but when they turn it’s impossible to bend round the corners. You’re going to need someone smaller than me if you want to get any further.’

No one said anything, but their thoughts immediately turned to Andrew. He wasn’t Garrett, though. A small body wrapped around a dense core of fear, he was not ready to volunteer to climb into a giant termite
nest. And even if he were, the chances of his mum letting him do it were less than zero.

‘Another option is to blast it,’ Garrett said cheerfully. She enjoyed using explosives.

‘What we got, Garrett?’ asked Webster.

‘Thanks to Wainhouse, we got everything we need.’ Wainhouse smiled in the darkness.

‘Hang on, hang on, is any of this stuff … I mean, is it going to be very disturbing and … loud?’ asked Bishop in a pointed whisper.

Garrett exhaled a derisory chuckle.

‘Yes,
Steven
, it’s going to be very disturbing and loud. That’s what you get with C4 and Semtex: disturbing and loud. Something wrong with that?’

‘Well, we still don’t know what’s around here. What if we wake something up?’

‘Bishop, you whiny-ass –’

‘We need to make this decision collectively,’ said Webster.

‘Well, sir, you got any other ideas?’ asked Garrett.

‘We haven’t explored this whole level. We don’t know what else we’re going to find that could be of use.’

‘You think they dug us another tunnel to the surface?’ asked Wainhouse. ‘Maybe one with a beer tap and some cable TV?’ He wanted to match Garrett for cockiness, but he was talking to the wrong guy.

‘Wainhouse,’ was all Webster needed to say, and the soldier shrank back from the cheeky Garrett sidekick he thought he had become.

‘We don’t know how much explosive we need to
blow the hell out of a giant termite’s nest, and we don’t need a landslide blocking the staircase if we get it wrong. The explosive is a last resort. There could be a number of options, like maybe a way to the lower level that will let us come back up to the stairs. Split up, take a look around and report back here in ten minutes.’

He turned to Bishop, Laura and Andrew. ‘You three stay here with me.’

‘Times like this, I wish I was a little more organized,’ Taj said to himself as he rummaged through the storeroom.

After twenty minutes of his fruitless searching, the others gave up hope of any useful discoveries and went to sit in the sunshine just outside the MEROS doors.

‘I’m … waiting for the plans,’ sang Taj, Lou Reed style.

Eventually, his search took him to the back of the storeroom, where he found several likely-looking boxes, which he dragged out and brought round to his desk.

‘Yo, yo, yo. I ain’t looking through these my lone self. Take one. First to find something good wins.’

They each picked up a box, found a quiet area and looked through its contents. Mills drew the short straw: accounts receivable and payable of equipment orders. Madison got the personnel records, which were of no use but certainly passed the time, especially Mills’ psych evaluation, which suggested he was a latent homosexual. Taj had the post-operational reports of all the missions, written by Webster and Bishop, and found they read like drier versions of the teenage adventure books he read to pass the time.

Jacobs hit the jackpot: blueprints, structural plans, everything from the tensile strength of the materials used to the original architectural proposals that had been rejected. She understood their importance immediately but kept them to herself. If she let the others know what she had, she’d have to deal with too many dumb suggestions and time-consuming arguments from Madison and Mills.

Within minutes, she had found the blueprint to the complex. Taking a quick glance, she could see it was exactly what they needed, but she would have to lay it out to get a good look at it.

‘Hey, what’s that?’ asked Taj.

‘Looks like the blueprints to downstairs,’ said Jacobs. They all gathered round to work out what they could see.

‘Yeah, that’s the canteen,’ said Madison.

‘How the fuck would you know?’ asked Mills. ‘How many times have you been down there?’

‘Enough, gay-boy.’

‘What did you fucking call me?’

‘Gay boy. You read your psych report?’ He grinned and waved the piece of paper in Mills’ face.

Mills snatched at it, skimmed it and hissed ‘Motherfuckers,’ before tearing it up in a rage, kicking Madison’s box over and storming off towards the jungle.

‘Nice one, Madison,’ muttered Jacobs, looking over the plans. Madison didn’t care. He didn’t think a dumb bastard like Mills would be much help anyway.