Species (36 page)

“Jesus!” Fitch exclaimed as he and Dan burst through the remains of the fire door. “I was positive you were right about the fire door, but it doesn’t look like it so much as slowed her down!”

“Let’s go!” Fitch’s van was parked at the end of the row and Press ran to it and pulled on the handle of the driver’s door. Locked, of course. He spun and drew his elbow up—

“Keys!” Fitch yelled. He threw something and Press’s arm stopped its reverse motion and darted up instead, snatching the small ring of keys before they could sail over the roof of the vehicle. “Otherwise the alarms’ll go crazy.”

“Gotcha.” Two steps to the right and he jammed the key into the lock and twisted it; the side door slid over and he was inside and pawing through Fitch’s portable defense arsenal. “Grab some flashlights,” he told Laura when she climbed in beside him. “Where the fu—found ’em!” His mouth stretched in a tight, dark grin and he held up a couple of flamethrowers with backstraps. He heaved one next to Laura and slung the other on his back, then reached for a Mossberg Model 590 Special Purpose shotgun with a speed-feed stock. A titanium-coated Specwar knife snapped to his belt completed the ensemble, and he and Laura clambered out of the van.

“Did you see her?” Fitch demanded as he leaned inside and seized a flamethrower for himself.

“No, she was out of the stairwell before we got down.” Laura wrestled her own flamethrower onto her back. “God, how much does this thing weigh?”

“Fifty pounds, give or take ten.” Press reached over and yanked it the rest of the way in place. “You know how to operate it? Short bursts, not long ones. The fuel doesn’t go far.”

“Just give me something to point at,” she retorted. “I’ll figure it out.”

“I think your ‘something’ came through that door,” Dan said worriedly.

“Which way did she go?” Fitch scanned the parking garage. “Any idea?”

“Not a clue,” Laura said. “Has everybody got a weapon of some kind? Hey—where’d Press go? Jesus, I’ve never known anyone who could sneak around like that guy!”

The three team members whirled as a man’s scream suddenly cut through the air. Four rows of cars away, a metal door marked
BOILER ROOM
banged open and smacked the wall behind it with a nerve-shattering
clang!

“Press!”
Laura’s face went white and she bolted for the open door, the others at her heels. Reeling through the opening, she staggered down a flight of creaking iron stairs and spun around the first landing, nearly ramming into the barrel of Press’s shotgun.

“Jesus, Laura—be careful!” Press swung the gun back, pointing it down the dimly lit landing.

“What was that scream?” Fitch hissed from behind Laura. “Was that her?”

“I don’t know,” Press said. “Let’s go, and for God’s sake,” he threw a reproachful look over his shoulder at Laura, “watch where you’re going
before
you get there!”

With Press in the lead, the group inched down the last of the stairs, then darted around a corner. Press stopped them with a chopping motion of one hand. At his feet was the disfigured body of a hotel maintenance worker. “Well,” he said in a low voice, “I guess she’s around here somewhere. One way or the other, we’re going to find her.”

“If she’s down here,” Laura words were a pseudo-whisper that could just be heard above the thunderous noise of the boiler in the middle of the room, “we’ve got her trapped. There’s no way for her to get out without going past us.”

“Look over there.” Press used the Mossberg to point at a smaller door marked
ELECTRICAL
at the far end of the dim room. The door was ajar and in the murky light trickling into it from the boiler room, they could barely see circuit breakers lining the wall beyond the entrance. No other light shone from its interior. Press’s eyes skimmed the boiler room one last time. “There’s no place else she could have gone,” he said. “Come on.”

The electrical room turned out to be hardly more than a large walk-in closet. The light switch was on the inside right wall but Press skipped it, unwilling to fully illuminate their own position when they didn’t know Sil’s. Besides, the beams of their lights, Afterburner Ballistics, were as good as directed cones of daylight in the small space and more than enough to show the farthest corner, where a jagged crater three feet in diameter had been dug into the concrete floor. “Damn it,” Press said, lowering the shotgun. “She’s dug her way out—again.”

Fitch peered over Press’s shoulder, trying to see. “But this is concrete!”

“Apparently that didn’t matter to your little creation any more than the steel door did in the garage.” Press and the others sidled up to the hole as he aimed his light into it; below them, a smooth-sided tunnel dropped a couple of feet, then curved away into darkness.

When she spoke, Laura’s voice sounded like a tightly wound spring. “Oh, God, Press. Does this mean . . . ?”

“Yeah, it does.” He swung the Mossberg’s strap over his shoulder, his eyes squinting in the beams of the Afterburners. “We’re going to follow. It’s time to go to the
real
party.” Without saying anything else, Press dove headfirst into the burrow.

“Oh, I really
hate
this,” Dan said unhappily as he and the others scooted in after Press. Weaponless and bringing up the rear, he found himself wishing he’d at least picked up a pistol or a knife from Fitch’s van. “Where do you think this goes, Press?”

After a moment of silence, Press answered from his position farther ahead. “Right here, guys.” He waited, sharp eyes following the sweep of his light, as the others crawled out of the tunnel and found their footing.

“Where’s here?” Fitch asked breathlessly. “What
is
this place?”

Press dragged the beam’s light across the pipes lining the ceiling that curved high above them. “Welcome to the Los Angeles sewer system,” he said in a hushed voice.

Speechless, the team gazed around. Their Afterburners did a great job of illuminating a room-sized portion of the huge pipe in which they stood, but an elbow turn in both directions sent the sewer back into blackness. As their voices faded away, other sounds moved in to fill the space: water dripping, an occasional small splash, the faint, scurrying echoes of rats moving along the catwalks on either side. A wide, sluggish river of cold, vile-colored water flowed at their feet, separating them from the walkway on the far side of the pipe. While the smell was none too pleasant, it still wasn’t as overpowering as the stench from the empty cocoon Sil had left on the train.

Press turned his beam in both directions, uncertain. Nothing either way moved or made a sound that was outside of what they would have expected. “Which way do you think she went, Dan?”

Covered in dirt from the burrow, Dan’s face looked sweaty and vulnerable in the harsh, compact circles of light. He stared one way, then the other; ultimately, he could only spread his hands. “I’m not sure. I just can’t be certain.”

Fitch grabbed the shoulder of Dan’s shirt and gave it a hard yank. “Well, think about it, will you? For Christ’s sake, Smithson, I thought you had some kind of extrasensory powers that would tell us this sort of thing!”

“I’m an empath, not a psychic,” Dan cried defensively. “It’s different!”

“Never mind,” Laura cut in. “We’ll find her—”

“That way,” Dan said. His glance to the south end of the tunnel was tense. “Let’s try that way.”

“It’s as good a bet as any.” With one hand on the Mossberg, Press moved off in the direction Dan had indicated. Laura followed, her gaze skipping quickly around the walls and the walkway, the rancid water at their feet.

“We’ll go the other way,” Fitch said firmly. “That way we’ll have both ends covered.”

Dan couldn’t move. “I—I’m not so sure we should do that, Dr. Fitch.”

“Get your ass over here, Smithson.” In the backwash from his Afterburner, two scarlet spots of anger dotted Fitch’s white face. “I’m not going alone and you’re the only one left. Come
on!”
He stalked down the catwalk a couple of yards, the nozzle of his flamethrower clenched in one hand. Above the trickling sounds of the water, the slow buzz of the double pilot light was less than comforting.

“Please, Dr. Fitch—wait!” Dan could see Fitch’s back, but the older man refused to slow his gait. “I—I may have gotten it wrong. I think we should go back and get help. Dr. Fitch, wait! Don’t go—” His voice choked off as a line of bubbles broke the surface of the water directly below his position on the catwalk. “I think there’s something down here!” he cried.

From the corner of his eye, Dan saw Fitch, flamethrower ready, spin and start back. “Stay put!” the doctor called. “I’ll be right there.” Moving as fast as he dared on the slick, narrow walkway, Fitch hurried toward him.

The bubbles at Dan’s feet multiplied, then abruptly disappeared. Terrified, Dan flattened himself as much as he could against the moist, curving wall behind him. His sight fastened on the water and he saw something pale and shiny—a spike?—break the surface halfway between him and Dr. Fitch for an instant. Then it disappeared below the brownish liquid.

Fitch saw it, too. With his finger on the trigger of the flamethrower, he halted at the spot and peered over the edge of the catwalk, trying to see. Another round of bubbles floated to the top of the slimy water and broke—
bloop! bloop!
—but nothing else followed. Was it Sil, or just a swimming rat?

“Dr. Fitch,” Dan pleaded as the other man leaned farther out over the water. “Come back, okay? This is very
bad—”

Fitch never had a chance to do it himself, but Dan screamed for him as something huge burst upward from the sewer water and clamped itself around the doctor’s face. Transparent tentacles flailed madly in the air below a sharklike mouth with multiple rows of teeth that ground through flesh and bone, sending a spray of crimson blood across the moldy wall in back of Fitch’s vibrating body. Still screaming, Dan glimpsed a huge, diaphanous torso below an oversized, elongated head topped with coils of metallic-looking hair; something large and darker than the rest of the life-form pulsed within its abdomen below the purplish-red tinge of vital organs. As Fitch’s body toppled into the fetid liquid, the scientist’s flamethrower slipped off his back and fell to the walkway floor, useless.

With a frenzied rush of icy water and spikes, the creature dove back under the surface and vanished as Press and Laura pounded down the catwalk toward Dan’s position, then slewed to a halt.

“Aw, shit!” Press swore. He reached out, trying to snare Fitch’s coat, but it was too late; bobbing leisurely, the man’s corpse drifted toward the opposite wall. Dismayed, they watched as a current took the body and made it do an obscene swirl before it floated quickly out of sight. “Shit,” Press repeated.

Dan was dripping and shivering from the cold water and his eyes were wide with remorse and terror when his gaze slid to Fitch’s surplus flamethrower. He picked it up with a grunt and struggled into it. “I never thought I could feel like I wanted to kill something,” he said despondently. Under the false sheen of the water, his skin had a ghastly gray overtone to it. “But now—”

“No,” Press interrupted. “Don’t think like that—it’s not healthy. I should know.” Dan didn’t answer and Press scrutinized the darkened areas of the pipe. He turned to look at Laura and Dan. “We have to go after it,” he said softly. “If we don’t risk it, there won’t be a world left for us to live in.”

“Okay,” Laura said. Her voice was shaking but the hands griping the stock of her flamethrower were steady. “I’m ready.” She glanced at Dan and he nodded.
“We’re
ready,” she amended. “Let’s do it.”

The catwalk again, leading them farther into the sewer and away from the Biltmore Hotel somewhere above. For some reason it was inexplicably darker the deeper they went, until their Afterburners seemed like pitiful candles in the blackness. Beneath their feet the walkway turned and they followed the pipe to the right, the only sounds accompanying their ragged breathing were the faint dribbling of running water and the tiny, faraway splashings of unseen creatures. Around the turn and twenty feet, thirty, then forty—

“Stop!” Dan said urgently. “She’s so close. I can feel her . . .
arrogance.”

“Arrogance?” Laura asked, bewildered.

The glare of the Afterburner in his hands made Dan nothing but a disembodied voice behind her, a ghostly phantom. “Yeah. She’s . . . watching us, I think. Laughing because she sees us but we can’t find her.” He sounded petrified. “Viewing us as such easy
prey.”

Press ran the light’s beam rapidly along the walls in front and in back of the group, the catwalk, the water. Nothing. Finally, he tried the ceiling of the main shaft, glimpsing only glistening pipes running off into the flat blackness. He swung the beam down and over the water’s surface again; they were lucky they weren’t being dripped on by the moisture above them—

With a yell of recognition, he brought the Afterburner back up, aiming it at the shining area on the ceiling. Shouting in surprise, Laura and Dan backpedaled as the light flashed across Sil’s eyes. They glittered redly for a half second, then she released the piping and sprang over their heads. Press let go with a blast from the flamethrower, but she was already gone. With a geyserlike spray, the sewer water enveloped her.

“My God,” Dan gasped. “She’s so
fast!”

“And bigger,” Press said flatly. “A
lot
bigger.” He shot a glance at Laura and she nodded.

“Oh yeah,” Laura said, her expression stiff, “she’s definitely pregnant.”

“What’s that noise?” Dan asked suddenly. “Hear it?”

Not too far down the sewer pipe, hissing and scraping sounds rose above the constant gush of running water. The three remaining team members rushed toward the commotion, balancing precariously along the slippery, moss-covered catwalk. A few more feet and the Afterburners’ glow reached far enough for them to see a new opening in the concrete wall of the main pipe on their side, this one slightly smaller than the one in the electrical closet in the Biltmore’s boiler room. Soil and rocks were still being pumped from the opening as Sil clawed her way into the earth. It took only a few more seconds for Press to dash to the gap, thrust the nozzle of the flamethrower inside, and squeeze the trigger. A wall of flame engulfed the shaft and Press yanked the flamethrower out of the crevice and threw himself to the side to avoid the backwash. Then—