Lincoln Child - Terminal Freeze

“Where should we aim?” he heard Creel pipe up, almost eagerly, from behind. “The head? The heart? The guts?”

“Just keep shooting until it falls down,” Gonzalez replied.

Ahead was the narrow opening that led to the radar-support spaces. It was pitch-black. Phillips entered first, sweeping left past the doorway. Gonzalez followed, reaching over and flipping on the lights with the palm of his hand.

Radar support was a series of three large rooms, one after another, all filled with monolithic metal racks arranged in a parallel line-a library of technological obsolescence. The first rack lay directly before them like a wall, its high shelves covered with ancient equipment for radar scanning, acquisition, and interpretation: dark CRT screens, logic boards festooned with vacuum tubes, multicolored tumbleweeds of tangled wire.

“Where does this lead?” Creel whispered.

“Nowhere,” Gonzalez replied. “It’s a cul-de-sac.”

“Sweet. So if the thing’s in here, we’ve got it cornered.”

Nobody answered.

Gonzalez peered along the tall metal casing, looking first left, then right. Then he turned to Phillips and Marcelin. “You two take the right-hand edge,” he said. “And watch your six.”

They nodded, then turned and crept down the narrow space between the wall and the first rack, weapons at the ready.

Gonzalez motioned to Creel. “We’ll go down the left. Meet us at the rear door. If you see anything-anything at all-sing out.”

“Got it.”

Gonzalez walked alongside the storage rack until he reached the left-hand wall of the room. Then he turned the corner quickly, raking the area with his eyes. The end caps of the other storage racks retreated toward the back of the room, the narrow corridors between them dark. To the left, along the wall, were deep niches for additional storage. Gonzalez took a slow breath, then started forward again, glancing down each row of storage racks as he passed it. At the far end of each he could make out the forms of Phillips and Marcelin doing the same, advancing up the right side.

It was the work of a minute to reach the rear of the room. He turned and walked along the back wall until he met up with the others at the doorway leading to the second storage area. “Anything?” he asked.

Phillips shook his head.

Gonzalez nodded. The room had not only looked empty; it had felt empty. Searching radar support began to seem like a waste of time. The creature had probably retreated down the staircase to C Level. Why would it be here, in this dead end?

“Let’s take the next,” he said, reaching through the doorway and snapping on the lights in the room ahead. “Same procedure.”

The second room seemed identical to the first: tall shelves full of long-forgotten equipment. It was as dead as the first room except for a faint humming noise, pitched very low, almost more felt than heard-excess air in the heating system, no doubt. Again, Gonzalez and Creel took the left-hand side, walking slowly and quietly along the storage racks, while the other two took the right. They reached the rear-which thanks to a burned-out bulb was only dimly illuminated-and once again rejoined Phillips and Marcelin at the doorway to the third room.

Gonzalez peered into the blackness ahead. “We’ll check, just to be thorough. Then we’ll go back to stairwell 12 and try C Level. Let’s go, same procedure.”

“Smell that?” Creel asked.

“Smell what?” said Phillips.

“I don’t know. Hamburger or something.”

Gonzalez reached in, snapped on the lights once again. A few fluorescent bulbs flickered into life. Then, seconds later, the nearest one dimmed with a quiet sizzle.

He frowned. Shit. What a time for the ballast to go. Now the distant part of the room lay in half-light, while the area directly ahead of them was shrouded in gloom.

Phillips snorted. “You picked a strange time to be hungry,” he told Creel.

Gonzalez stepped through the doorway, the others following.

“No, man. I didn’t mean cooked hamburger.”

Gonzalez turned to the left, preparing to walk yet again along the storage rack, Creel right behind him. Then he stopped.

Ahead, where the walls met, he could make out the first of several equipment niches. Except this niche didn’t contain the metal-sided radar units he’d observed before. Instead, something lay in the bottom; something that shone dully in the faint light.

“My head hurts,” said Marcelin.

Gonzalez reached for his flashlight, stabbed its beam toward the niche. The light illuminated a twisting of clear plastic, something caked with dried blood inside.

Peters.

At that precise moment, Marcelin began to whimper.

Gonzalez wheeled around. Something was peeping out at them from around the opposite corner of the storage rack. In the brief moment that he saw it, Gonzalez registered a heavy, shaggy pelt of dark hair; a large ear, heart-shaped like a bat’s and set at an angle lateral to the head; and a single yellow eye.

And there was something else. The head was too high, too high off the ground…

There was a roar in his ear as Creel’s grenade launcher exploded. The shell rocketed along the storage case and exploded against a shelf half a dozen feet short of where the head had been. The room shook. Red-and-yellow smoke roiled back toward them and pieces of metal and vacuum-tube glass rained everywhere.

“Back!” Gonzalez yelled.

They scrambled back into the second room.

“Take up positions in the corners!” Gonzalez ordered. “Phillips, Marcelin, cover the door! Careful of crossfire!”

He retreated to the rear left corner of the second room and hunkered down, using the end cap of the last storage rack for cover, aiming his M16 at the darkened doorway. His heart was beating faster than it ever had in his life.

Creel was jabbering beside him. “Oh, God. Oh, God.”

“Get behind me,” Gonzalez said. “If it comes for us, aim at the door. The door, you hear me? If you shoot my men by accident, I’ll shoot you.”

But Creel didn’t seem to hear. “Oh, God…”

“Ready yourselves!” Gonzalez shouted to the soldiers. There was no response from the far side of the room save a faint whimper that was probably Marcelin.

He sighted down the barrel of his M16, struggling to control the sudden, unfamiliar panic that had at first almost overwhelmed him. A dreadful minute passed, then two. Gonzalez tried to blink away the sweat coursing down his forehead. The low sound he’d noticed before was louder now, filling his ears and even his head with a dull ache that…

A headache. Marcelin had mentioned that, too-

Gonzalez went rigid. In the darkness of the doorway, something moved.

He blinked again, passed a hand quickly over his eyes. It was some trick of the dim light. But no: there was movement in the shadows, gray against gray. For a moment, it stopped. Then it started again and-slowly, slowly-the head slid out. A low noise, like the gargle of a drowning man, began to sound in Creel’s throat. Gonzalez stared, paralyzed like the rest. Christ, it just seemed to keep on coming, dark and bullet-shaped, with a massive crest of bone at the rear leading to a set of incredibly powerful, high-set shoulders. It was like nothing Gonzalez had ever seen. It was magnificent. It was terrifying.

The head was fully through the doorway now, staring in the direction of Marcelin and Phillips. As Gonzalez watched, the head moved again and-with an agonizing, insolent slowness-turned to look at him. The yellow eyes seemed to hold his own eyes in thrall. Then the jaw opened and Gonzalez’s gaze dropped to it and-sweet Jesus, what the hell were those…

Abruptly he felt the hinges of his sanity begin to loosen. His finger twitched spasmodically against the trigger guard.