Jonathan Maberry - The Dragon Factory

When I was done he gave my wrist two sets of two taps. Message received and understood.

We reoriented ourselves and moved farther along the hall until we could hear voices. Whispers from several men. Low, quiet, and in Russian. I could make out what they were saying, but there wasn’t time to translate for Bunny. Besides, none of it was tactically important. One man asked another when the lights were coming back on, and a gruff voice-probably a sergeant or team leader-told him to shut the hell up.

I holstered my pistol and took two grenades from my harness. A flash bang in my left and a fragmentation grenade in my right. From the faint rustle I knew Bunny was doing the same.

“Light ’em up!” I hissed, and we pulled the pins on the flash bangs.

If the Russians heard me, it didn’t matter. We sailed the grenades into the emptiness in front of us, squeezed our eyes shut, and covered our ears the best we could. Even so, the blast and starburst was like a hot knife through the brain.

It was far worse for the Russians.

The grenades burst in the air right above them and I opened my eyes a second after the detonation. I saw them-maybe twenty in all-reeling back from the intense light, screaming at the pain in their ears, too shocked and confused to do anything. The last sparks of the flash gave Bunny and me perfect distance and angle.

“Frag out!”

We threw.

They died.

Not all of them. We had to shoot three of them.

But the rest took the shrapnel full in the face. The fools had been spooked by the dark and had grouped together for safety. It had been a stupid mistake, but they probably thought they owned this hallway.

Now it was their tomb.

The echo of the blast rolled up and down the hallway, and my head rang from the thunder. Even pressing your hands to your ears can only block out a portion of that noise.

I turned on my flashlight and swept the beam over the charnel house.

“God Almighty,” said Bunny.

I cupped a hand around my mouth.

“Hopscotch!” I yelled.

A moment later the reply echoed back to us.

“Jump rope!”

It was Redman. Alpha Team had survived.

We converged on the hatch. We pulled chemical light sticks and threw them down so that we all met in a mingled blue and green glow. One of the Alphas came last, supporting Top, who looked ashy and ill.

“How you holding up?” asked Bunny, hurrying over to help.

“Just fucking peachy, Farmboy. Took you long enough.”

“Yeah, we stopped at a titty bar for a few beers.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

Redman closed on me while I was examining the hatch. “First Sergeant Sims won’t accept any painkillers. He threatened to kneecap the first son of a bitch who tried to give him morphine.”

“He seems to be in that kind of mood. Leave him alone. We have other fish to fry. We need to get through this hatch.”

Before he’d been promoted to Grace’s number two, Redman had been the demolitions expert for Alpha. He ran his hand over the hatch and then crabbed sideways and knocked on the wall.

“Okay, Cap,” he said, “we couldn’t blow that hatch with an RPG, but the wall is just block. If we can knock a big hole in it, I can rig a compressed charge and maybe make us a doorway. We have just about enough C4 for that; it’s the hole that’s going to be the problem.”

“I need solutions, not problems.”

Redman looked at the dead Russians, then turned to one of the Alphas. “Beth-check the bodies. I need grenades and explosives. If they have any, it’ll be Semtex. Detonators, too. Whoever has the most Semtex will have the detonators. Do it now.”

Alpha Team moved with a purpose, and in under two minutes Redman had twenty grenades and four tubes of plastic explosive. Three of the four Russian detonators had been broken, but he said he only needed one.

He set to work rigging the grenades together over a wad made from half of the Semtex. He draped it with three layers of Hu’s polymer blast dampening cloth, placed the detonator with great care, and started backing up, unspooling wire as he went. I chased everyone back to the sharp bend in the corridor and we all flattened out on the floor by the wall.

“Fire in the hole!” Redman called, and clicked the detonator.

The blast was massive. Smoke and dust blew over us, funneling around the curved corridor.

As soon as it was clear, I was up and running, a cloth pressed to my face, squinting through the smoke. There was a smoking crater in the wall that was at least eight inches deep, and fissures ran outward from side to side and floor to ceiling.

“Damn,” Redman said, “I’m good.”

He set to work on the second part of the job, gouging the cracked inner stone to make a tight crevice for his C4. He packed it tight. A compressed blast does far more damage, and we needed damage. We needed a doorway big enough for me to climb through.

Once he was done we repeated our retreat and he clicked the detonator.

This blast was bigger but not louder. A lot of the force went into the stone wall with such intensity that we felt the vibration run along the floor.

Again I was up and running, and as I approached the wall I knew that Redman had broken through. I could feel a breeze of moist heat coming at me through the smoke. I waved furiously at the cloud of dust and shined my light at the hole.

It went all the way through.

But it wasn’t big enough.

Not for me. Not for any of us.

And we’d used all of our explosives.

The Chamber of Myth

Tuesday, August 31, 2:53 A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 33 hours, 7 minutes E.S.T.

Grace moved away from the corpse of the Berserker and retraced her steps to the path. Ahead of her in the darkness she could hear the whispered conversation of Hecate and her father. It was no longer stationary. Grace crouched and listened, tracking the sound even though she couldn’t make out the words. The sound moved from left to right in front of her. There were no points of reference to guess distance, especially with whispers, but it couldn’t have been more than twenty yards.

What was to the right?

The sound told her. The soft hiss of the waterfall. That’s where Hecate was going. She remembered that metal panel in the back. A door or access panel. Grace was willing to bet a lot on it being a door.

She adjusted her course, feeling ahead for the terrain. She found a line of small rocks and recognized them as stones that lined the path used by the groundskeeping staff. Perfect.

“-give me a second-”

It was a snatch of a comment and Grace froze. Whoever said it couldn’t have been more than a dozen feet in front of her. She drew her pistol and listened.

“-here it is!” whispered Hecate. “There’s a release right under the-”

Grace fired in the direction of the voice. She knew that her first shot would probably miss, but the muzzle flash would show her where to put the second shot.

After the absolute darkness the flash was eye-hurtingly bright, but it froze a picture in her mind. The back of the waterfall. Hecate reaching up under the overhang of moss, her lithe body stretching. Cyrus behind her, his fist clutched around something that hung from a lanyard around his neck. Otto Wirths in the foreground, bent in the direction of the panel.

A flash image. There and gone.

Grace smiled and squeezed off five more shots.

She heard a scream.

And then the wall five feet to her right exploded, showering her with debris. A chunk of rock the size of a fist struck her on the side of her shoulder, and her last shot was high and wide.

Grace fell over and her gun vanished into the darkness.