Matt Reilly Stories (2 page)

The
team entered anyway.

‘Man,
when Hell freezes over…’ someone said.

He
was right.

It
looked like Hell…frozen-over.

Immediately
inside the iron doors, they found a giant grey all-concrete receiving dock. It
was flanked by some glass-walled administration offices.

Blood
was splattered everywhere—painting the dock’s concrete walls and the offices’
glass windows with long foul strokes.

Human
body parts lay strewn about the floor, preserved for years by the extreme cold,
body parts that seemed…

…half-eaten.

A
layer of frost covered everything.

Beyond
the receiving dock, past a heavy steel door, they found a wide spiralling
stairwell, going down into hazy darkness.

Armstrong
peered down into the stairwell—

—just
as something large and leathery swooped low and fast behind his head and with
an ear-piercing shriek ripped the head of the man behind him
clean off
!

Armstrong
whirled around—just as Rockmeyer opened fire on the creature—
brrrraaaappp!
—and
it smashed against the nearest wall, hit.

It
lay on the floor, whimpering, dying.

The
eleven remaining Marines gathered around it, stared at it.

It
was man-sized, but with oily scaled skin and bat-like wings. It looked a little
like a pterodactyl, the flying dinosaur, only its head was more developed, more
complex, like that of a miniature
dragon
.

‘Mother
of
God
, it just tore Kasdan’s head off…’

‘Jesus,
it’s just like the two we saw at Groom Lake…’

‘Which
means,’ Armstrong said, ‘the Russians might also have some of the bigger ones.
And that’s why we’re here. Stay sharp.

Twohy
and de Souza, stand guard here. The rest of you, come on.

It’s
time to get nasty.’

They
descended the stairs.

THE
STAIRCASE AND THE HANGAR

The
staircase was open-sided, open to the air.

It
was actually a tall-and-spindly spiralling
structure
that hung from the
ceiling of an immense underground room. But this spiralling staircase never
reached the floor of the hangar—it ended abruptly thirty feet
above
the
floor of the room, at a long straight catwalk that was itself suspended off the
floor.

For
in the centre of this hangar, on its base, directly underneath the long
catwalk, stood the centrepiece of Complex 13.

A
spaceship.

THE
SHIP

In
a word, it was
magnificent
.

Even
under a layer of 50-year-old frost, it was magnificent.

Its
lines were streamlined and smooth; its outer shell was silver, armoured and
hard. It had two downswept wings, one high tailfin and three mammoth rear
thrusters.

Totally
alien.

Totally
cool.

It
was largely intact, except for its great crushed nose—the result of a
tremendous crash many years ago.

Filling
the vast floor area all around the ship was a huge multi-holed alien structure,
like a nest of some sort, or a three-dimensional spiderweb, dotted with
thousands of foul slimy holes.

This
huge web fanned out from the ship and climbed the walls of the hangar. It too
was covered in frost.

All
was still.

‘There!’
Armstrong pointed at a small office, also raised off the floor, bolted to the
wall at the very end of the catwalk far below them. ‘That must be the lab!
Move!’

Down
the staircase they raced.

As
they ran, more of the man-sized dragons emerged from nests mounted on the walls
of the hangar. They swooped in on the double-helix-like staircase—as the
Marines descending the stairs returned automatic fire at them.

The
dragons squealed, some fell, flapping and spasming.

One
grabbed a Marine and hurled him off the stairs, sending him falling a hundred
feet into the web-like formation on the floor of the hangar. The man landed in
the web, which cushioned his fall, and he survived…

…for
about two seconds.

 
Thwack!
 He was grabbed by a fiendishly strong claw that reached out from the
nearest hole and yanked him out of sight, screaming. Then—

 
Crunch!

A
foul blast of human blood came spraying out of the hole and the screaming
stopped.

‘
Fucking
 hell…’ the Marine behind Armstrong breathed.

Armstrong
paid him no heed. He hit the catwalk on the fly, just as one of the winged dragons
landed on it right in front of him and bared its teeth.

Two
booming shots from his Desert Eagle pistol removed the dragon’s head and it
stumbled and staggered—headless—before falling off the catwalk, out of his way.

Behind
him, another Marine fell.

They
were three down, now.

Armstrong
came to the lab, found the door locked from the inside.

Four
booming gunshots fixed that. The door came free and he kicked it open and
entered.

THE
DEATH LAB

It
was quiet as a tomb in the lab.

No
squeals, no gunfire, no blood-sprays.

Armstrong
and his men fanned out. ‘Gentlemen! Files, notes, everything you can find. We
can’t stay for long! Move it!

Koepp—cover
that door behind us!’

As
his men went to work, Armstrong scanned the lab—benches, desks, filing
cabinets, serum bottles; all of it covered in frost; long abandoned.

An
ice-encrusted human corpse lay in a corner—coiled in the fetal position, frozen
in death; but whole, uneaten.

‘Doc!’
Armstrong called to his medic. ‘Check him out!’

Doc
slid to the dead man’s side, examined him.

‘He
froze to death, sir. Musta locked himself in here to hide from the aliens.’

Someone
called: ‘Jesus, these records date back to 1938, when the ship was found buried
half a mile underneath Tunguska…the Soviets believed its crash was the impact
in 1908. It had just penetrated deep underground…’

Another
man said, ‘They brought it inside this facility—and examined it for years,
venturing ever deeper into it. Then, in mid-1956, they found the creatures in
its innermost chamber. But they were frozen in some kind of suspended-animation
unit.

Hibernation
units. They were sleeping. And the stupid Soviets woke them up. Within three
years, it was all over.’

Armstrong
was still standing near the frozen laboratory worker.

Clasped
in the dead man’s hands was a large notepad.

Armstrong
grabbed it, flipped it open.

The
early pages were written in neat, clinical Russian:

‘
The extra-terrestrials adore the taste of human meat.

 
Live
human meat. They won’t touch the dead prisoners.

 
Saw
the anti-social writer, Polemov, thrown into the ship
today. He wasn’t
as brave as he was in his anti-Soviet
writings! He screamed like a girl
as they dragged him
across the catwalk and tossed him in.
’

And
another entry:

‘
These creatures do not appear to be the builders of the
spaceship. It
is well beyond their development. The
remains of least nine other alien
species have been found
on the ship—all dead. Only this species
survived. Was this
some kind of zoological transport ship in which the
animals escaped?

Then
this entry:

‘
The creatures seem to go through three life-phases: the
slug-like
infant phase, the dragon-like flying adult, and
then the largest phase
of all, the enormous super-adults
that live in the holes of the large
web/mound formation.

 
The
infant phase lasts approximately five weeks. The
adult phase, ten weeks.
The super-adult phase, another
ten weeks. Total life-span, twenty-five
weeks.

‘The
life-cycle is reminiscent of the common butterfly,
only with one additional stage: a small slug becomes a
large winged
adult which then cocoons again and
becomes much, much larger...

 
‘According
to CoMr.ade Dr Karlov, at the fifth week of
super-adult life, the
creatures give asexual birth to new
infants. On present observations,
the good doctor
estimates that everyone super-adult gives birth to two
infants…
’

But
then, late in the notebook, the ordered writing became a frantic, messy,
desperate scrawl:

‘
We’ve lost control of the complex! Karlov was wrong! It
wasn’t a
one-to-two ratio at all! Only the first generation
had that ratio. The
second generation of super-adults
gave birth to four infants. The next
gave birth to eight.

 
Then
the next: sixteen! They have now multiplied beyond
our control and are
taking over the complex!
’

The
final entry read:

‘
The order has been given. Complex 13 is surrounded by the Spetsnatz who, along
with the outside temperatures, are keeping the creatures at bay. The Complex is
now to be buried under a deliberate landslide, triggered by explosives. Trapped
in this laboratory, I cannot get out, unless I choose to run the gauntlet of a
thousand man-eating creatures. I will die in here. For the hundreds of men I
have marched to their deaths, may God have mercy on my soul.’

Armstrong
stuffed the notebook into his backpack. ‘I have the breeding information!’ he
called.

‘And
I have the killing information,’ one of his men said. ‘The Soviets did experiments
on them with different temperatures. Heat is no good—they can survive
superheated temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. No wonder our grenades
didn’t work! But they’re not impervious to cold! According to this data, the
things can’t survive temperatures below -35° Celsius!’

‘That’s
why they’re trapped in here…’ Doc said.

‘And
that’s exactly the information we need,’ Armstrong called.

‘Now
let’s get the hell out of here.’

JOURNEY
OUT OF HELL

Out
of the lab they bolted.

Dozens
of squealing man-sized dragons now filled the air of the hangar.

Armstrong
and his men fired up in every direction as they ran, bringing down creatures
all around them.

They
came to the spindly metal spiral staircase leading to the ceiling…

…just
as a series of great low growls arose from the floor of the hangar.

Every
man froze.

The
high-pitched squeals of the smaller dragons stopped.

Then,
with a great cracking sound, five large super-adults burst up out of the
web-formation on the floor of the hangar!

They
were enormous—not only possessed of
heads
 like T-Rexs, but each was the
size and shape of a T-Rex, only with huge flapping leathery wings and six
free-grasping claws which they used to grab prey. Their heads were utterly
terrifying: long-nosed and leathery, with giant jaws equipped with teeth twenty
inches long!

And
how they moved!

The
great superdragon-like monsters soared into the air, swooping around the
staircase like giant bats, snapping at Armstrong and his men. They towered over
the humans—easily double their size.

One
creature bit a Marine clean in half.

Another
grabbed two with its claws and stuffed them
both
into his mouth
together.

In
both cases the creature in question instantly
vomited up
 its food,
spraying blood and partially-digested human remains everywhere in some peculiar
kind of eating function. No sooner had the remains hit the floor than hundreds
of little slug-like creatures emerged from the web and started eating the
shredded remains.

Yet
another of the super-adults made for Armstrong himself—but the Finisher just
whirled to face it and fired his large-bore Desert Eagle right into the
monster’s left eye.