Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) (20 page)

“Oh rats,” she said as the clicking grew closer.

“What?” Burns asked, turning.

“It’s a million rats,” she said.

When Taylor Burns saw the legion of two-foot rats swarming up the stairs at them, he let out a gasp. The noise had been the tapping of their black claws ticking against the marble floors.

The rats moved with a singular purpose, accelerating like a furry brown wave toward the two people on the stairs. Their eyes were yellow in the dim light, and their teeth looked nothing like the biting, cutting incisors of a typical rodent. They had sprouted mouths full of curved fangs, which they clacked together as they closed in on their quarry.

“Up, up, up!” Nicole screamed, and they rushed upstairs.

When they arrived at the ground floor where they had started, they saw a river of mutant rats streaming from both directions, heading for the stairway, all of them led by a single purpose – to kill and devour the humans who had intruded upon their lair. The ticking of their claws was suddenly very loud.

“Keep going,” Burns prodded Nicole, turning and shooting off several rounds at the mass of creatures. He nailed a few of them, and he took a giggling childish delight as they spun in the air, squeaking loudly and falling into the middle of the horde. Several other rat creatures immediately started gnawing on the corpses of their brethren.

Nicole rushed up the next flight of stairs, taking the steps two at a time. She reached the top and saw a hallway with several of the vermin looking surprised at her appearance. There were probably only a few dozen, but she shouted for Burns to follow her up to the next level.

I hope it’s not even worse up there,
she thought.
And there’d better be a way down after getting up so high.

They turned two more times on empty landings, then arrived at the fourth floor hallway. Nicole scanned the corridor and breathed a sigh of relief.

“No rats,” she shouted back at Burns, who was right beside her. “But there’s a door. Don’t know where it leads.”

“Just get the hell in there,” he said, reaching into the pocket of his vest. “Now!”

The rats were leaping up the stairs, hopping obscenely, their naked pink tails dragging behind them. The blood of their buddies excited them, turned them into something closer to a school of piranha. They thrashed, swarmed over each other in their blind frenzy.

Nicole swung the door open, and she rushed inside, looking both ways through her rifle scope as she did so. The room was lined with books, contained dozens of wooden tables and chairs, lit by green hooded table lamps. Computers rested on several of the desks. At the far end of the room was a doorway to another room. Other than a long streak of crimson by the information desk, she didn’t see any signs of life inside this place.

“Come on,” she said, pulling Burns into the room behind her.

She attempted to close the heavy doors, but they were locked into position somehow, so they rushed to the other end of the room, with the rats following only a few yards behind them. Burns overturned computers, smashing them to the floor to create obstructions as they moved.

They ran under an arch and into a very large room to their left. It was like a huge pit, filled with long tables with the same green shaded lamps on them. A large information area was situated on the left-hand side. All around the pit was a raised area with no way to access it. A wrought-iron gate separated it from the floor below. Books completely lined every wall, many of them of a green color. Above the bookshelves, there were tall windows where Nicole could spot the blue of the sky and a flutter of red material blowing in the breeze. Overhead were several impressive chandeliers.

“Not here!” she shouted behind her over the scrambling rat noises. “Nowhere to go.”

“Doesn’t matter for now! Get inside and shut the damn door behind me,” Burns said, removing one of his grenades from the pocket of his vest. He bit down on the pin, yanking it out at the same time that his rifle ran out of ammunition. He made a mad dash toward the reading room, and Nicole slammed the door behind him. He immediately spun around to face the heavy wooden door.

“Brace yourself,” he said, and Nicole spread her legs a bit, holding on to a wooden bookcase filled with multicolored volumes.

There was a muffled
whumf!
The walls shook a bit, and some of the books fell off the shelves in the huge room. The heavy wooden door cracked down the middle, one long crease, but it held against the blast. From the opposite side, Nicole heard despairing, high-pitched squeaking noises, and the wet slap of internal organs smacking against the wood. A smattering of blood splashed underneath the door.

“Come on,” Burns said, shouldering his newly loaded rifle. “That won’t hold them for long.”

Nicole needed to see, so she flung the door open. Many of the mutants had been blasted into smithereens. Blood and pink organs covered every surface of the hallway. There was a huge hole where the explosion had pockmarked the marble of the stairs, and it saddened Nicole to see such a beautiful building defaced. The hordes of rats had retreated back to the computer room, and they were stumbling about in confusion and terror. Satisfied, she shut the door, feeling it crack even more under the pressure.

Taking advantage of the creatures’ bewildered state, Burns led the way across the room, past the information desk where an office chair lay on its side. He pointed up toward the windows. Beyond the glass, red and yellow banners flapped in the wind, the exterior hanging advertisements of the Soviet photography exhibition.

Nicole looked around. “How do we get up there? I don’t see an entrance to the second level.”

Burns shook his head and handed her his rifle and rucksack. He grabbed the bottom of the iron railing that ran around the pit area and hauled himself up to a point where he could hike a leg over the gate. The muscles on his forearms stretched taut under his skin. Once he was on his feet, he motioned for Nicole to hand up his gun and supplies.

Behind her, she heard scraping as the rats grew bolder and scratched curiously at the cracked door. While she handed the bag up to the general, she heard the splintering of the wood as the rats gnawed their way through the crack. They streamed into the room through the new hole they had chewed, and they raced toward Nicole’s feet. She was astonished at how a creature with such stumpy legs could gain such speed.

Burns grabbed her bag and gun and flung them behind him. From his vantage point, he saw the little beasts rushing across the room. They were at the information desk when he reached down and grasped Nicole’s extended arms in his hands and dragged her up to his level. She scraped the front of her stomach against the railing, then clambered over it until she stood next to Burns.

The rats filled the pit area, poking around, turning their disgusting, pinched faces up toward the two humans above them. As Burns and Nicole shouldered their bags and armed themselves again, the vermin continued to pour into the room through the gap in the door.

Burns peered outside for a moment, grinned, and pointed his rifle toward the sky beyond the window.

“That’s Bryant Park right out there,” he said.

“Where the fashion shows are?” Nicole asked.

He looked puzzled for a moment. “I didn’t take you for a
Vogue
reader.”

“I’m not, but Sandy loved
Project Runway
, and I have to watch it with her sometimes.”

“Fine,” he said, cutting her off. “How were you at rope climbing in gym?”

“First in my class.”

“Of course you were,” he said with a wide grin. “The subway station’s just past Bryant Park, right out there. So we’re going out these windows, climbing down those cloth banners, and dashing across the park.”

Nicole glanced out the window. It looked like a long way down, and the breeze was blowing the banners back and forth across the side of the library. The park appeared empty except for a Lycanthrope here and there. Might have been ten or eleven of them in the wide green space. The construction site, where all the grass would have been, seemed like an ugly scar across the park, and the bulldozer was a sleeping sentry. Something lay bleeding in the fountain.

It was a crazy idea. The cloth might tear; it might not hold their weight. The beasts in the park might see them climbing down and decide to wait for them at the bottom, leaving them stranded halfway between one set of monsters and another. The wind might toss them off their bearings. It was an exceedingly dangerous idea.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

Burns shot out the glass of the window, and then kicked most of the remaining jagged edges out of the way. Nicole used the butt of her rifle to help widen the opening. The cloth of the banner flapped partway into the hall through the busted glass, as though helping them get a better grip. Burns grabbed it, held tight, the muscles in his arm flexing impressively as the banner tried to flap the other way again.

“Go,” he said. “Quick.”

As she grabbed hold of the banner, she felt how thick and sturdy it was, and it eased her fears a bit. She placed her rifle over her shoulder and made sure her pockets were all sealed so she wouldn’t lose any other weapons on her way down.

The rats were working themselves into a frenzy in the pit. Some of them climbed upon the bookshelves, using them as ladders to get up to the second level. Many of them reached it, squeezing through the decorative bars of wrought iron and galloping toward Burns.

“Hurry!” he shouted out the busted window.

He let go of the cloth, and the wind almost jerked Nicole outside. As she burst through the broken window, Burns pulled the pin on another grenade and tossed it at the newly assembled rat carpet in the pit, where many creatures had discovered how to climb up to their prey. They scattered a bit, then Nicole was scurrying down the banner, using her feet to rappel down the side of the building. She had an absurd momentary thought of Adam West and Burt Ward in the old
Batman
TV show.

The grenade exploded at the same time Taylor Burns leapt out the window and clutched hold of the banner. The blast blew more glass shards at him, and the force of it flung his body farther out, even as he held on to the cloth with both hands. It jarred Nicole, and she nearly lost her grip as the banner started to spin around. The cords in her forearms stretched rigid, and sharp pains shot up her wrists. Small chunks of hard marble rained down on her head as she passed the second floor.

They waited for a moment, dangling from the banner until it stopped swinging in circles. When it ceased, the two soldiers started descending, hand over hand, their legs wrapped in the fabric. Nicole landed on the hard concrete outside the library and instantly hoisted her rifle to her shoulder. Whipping her head from side to side, she took in the terrain.

When Burns landed next to her, leaping the last few feet, she saw he was covered in rat blood. It dripped from his chin. His face and upper body were smeared with the stuff, and she realized the final grenade had decimated a large portion of the swarm, but it had been closer than she’d thought.

“Ummm, you’ve got a little something on your face,” she said, smiling a bit.

“Yeah? Who gives a rat’s ass?”

“I do believe that’s exactly what’s on your face. A rat’s ass.”

“Shut up and move,” he commanded. “We aren’t alone.”

Looking into the park, she saw that several Lycanthropes had gathered around a fountain, and they were devouring a horse that lay on its side in the still sprinkling water. It was still attached to an overturned cart, and its innards were strewn throughout the bubbling water. Its eyes were open, but something had already plucked them out as hors d’oeuvres. Its lips were pulled back into a final scream of terror.

“Jesus,” Nicole said.

The Lycanthropes had noticed them, had watched the vaudeville of their climb down the banners. Now, they were standing on their twisted feet, staring at them with yellow eyes.

They were all salivating.

Fresh meat had just fallen out of the sky.

2:45 p.m.

Sandy watched through the subway car’s window as the mutated lions continued to sleep. They looked contented, even snored a bit. If it weren’t for the oversized claws and the abundance of teeth, they would have looked almost cuddly. Every once in a while, one of their tufted tails would swish through the air, as if they were dreaming.

“Makes you wonder, huh?” Howard asked, sitting next to her. He kept his voice lowered to a whisper and his pole-like weapon resting on the floor within reach.

“What?”

“If this was all meant to be somehow.”

“These are mutations,” Sandy said. “By definition, it means they aren’t normal.”

“Oh, I know that, but what if there’s some plan at work, if this is all – I don’t know – cosmic evolution.”

“You’re crazy. Those Lycans are more animal than human, more primitive instinct than intelligent.”

“You ever hear about that church that said this was all God’s work, that we should all learn how to embrace the beast? They always said that mankind had become too self-absorbed, too full of himself, and this was God’s way of getting man back to what he was in the Garden of Eden.”