Crysis: Escalation (21 page)

Earl had an old H&K .45 in one hand. He was helping Hank up onto the beam with the other.

‘What the fuck!?’ Chino demanded. The boat had gone and what was left of Davis was a dark cloud of blood spreading on the surface of the water, though limbs and other body parts were
starting to bob to the surface.

Something exploded out of the water and grabbed the beam they were all on. Chino fired, worked the shotgun’s slide and fired again. He was dimly aware of a .45 being fired faster than
he’d ever heard one fired before. The beam broke. The water rushed up to meet him.

Chino broke the surface of the water screaming, with his knife/machete cross in his hand, shaking. He hadn’t been able to make out what it was that had leapt out of the water but he knew
one thing for certain: it wasn’t human.

Earl was on the surface as well. The old guy also had his knife out.
Hank, shit
, Chino thought. The ex-Jarine was weighed down with an MMG and about half a tonne of ammunition.

‘Did we get it?’ Chino asked.

‘Dunno,’ Earl said. Chino wasn’t sure if Earl was just being calm or was, in fact, adrenalin deficient.

‘I’m going down for Hank,’ Chino told him. Earl nodded. It was instinct. Get your people out. It was only when he dived under the surface of the bloody water that he realised
that he would be in there with . . . with whatever the fucking thing that had attacked them was.

It was pitch dark in the water. He grabbed his torch and flicked it on. He saw the ex-marine panicking, trying to unclip his MMG and drag off the belts of ammunition at the same time. He was
between two of the tables on the floor of the submerged Chinese restaurant. Chino kicked down quickly. He grabbed Hank a little too hard before realising his mistake, as it just freaked Hank out
further. He got the marine’s attention, signalled for him to calm down, and then used his thumb to motion upwards.

Chino glanced up. He couldn’t see Earl. He helped Hank out of the weighty ammunition, made sure he had hold of his MMG and then pushed him upwards before kicking off himself. As he
assisted Hank’s ascent he caught the sensation of movement behind him, from somewhere out in the water on Mott Street. He glanced back but all he saw was beams of moonlight refracting through
the water.

‘Over here!’ Earl called as they broke the surface. Earl was on a flight of stairs that led up into another level of the building. Chino was all but dragging Hank with him towards
the stairs. He felt something brush against him under the water, panicked and redoubled his pace, swimming in a frenzy towards the steps. He felt Earl grab Hank and pull the marine out of the
water. Chino all but crawled up the wooden stairs.

It smashed through the stairs beneath Chino. He felt blades dig into his leg and open his flesh as it tried to drag him under the water. Earl threw himself bodily down the stairs, grabbed Chino
as he was being dragged back into the water. Earl’s other hand smoothly brought up the H&K Mk 23 pistol. Earl fired the pistol rapidly. The slide went back on an empty magazine. Chino
realised there was nothing trying to drag him into the water anymore. He all but climbed over Earl, scrambling up the stairs. He burst through a doorway at the top of the stairs and collapsed on
the floor, gasping for breath. Earl appeared in the doorway behind him.

‘Grenade,’ the Missourian told them and then turned and dropped a fragmentation grenade into the submerged restaurant. There was a subdued explosion and water slopped into the
room.

Hank rose up looking furious, and went and stood in the doorway and started shooting the MMG wildly into the water. Earl put a hand on the ex-marine’s shoulder. Hank stopped firing.

‘Easy now brother, bullets are no good in water.’

Hank nodded. Chino realised that the Georgian wasn’t furious. He was terrified. Hank was shaking like a leaf. Earl ejected the magazine from his Mk 23 and replaced it with a new one,
working the slide to chamber a round and then holstering it with the safety off. He started to dry his M14.

‘You need to dry your weapons as best you can,’ he told them.

‘You see what it was?’ Chino asked, looking around. It looked like they were in the restaurant’s wine storage area. Chino repressed the borderline-hysterical urge to have a
drink to steady his nerves. Earl shrugged.

‘Alien I guess, don’t know, never seen one before, zombies I seen but not aliens.’ Hank and Chino stared at Earl. It was one of the longest things Earl had ever said to them
that hadn’t been strictly operational. ‘I’m going to have a look around. You need to look to that leg.’ He told Chino. ‘And one of you needs to watch the
door.’

‘I’m on it,’ Hank told him, still stood in the doorway, MMG at the ready.

‘Move back a little,
ese
, don’t silhouette yourself in the doorway,’ Chino said. He knew that Hank knew this, just like he knew that the marine was shaken up despite
being a New York veteran and, apparently, having seen some shit in Russia whilst working for CELL.

Earl brought the M14 up, took the condom off the end of the barrel and disappeared into the mists.

Chino pulled the med kit out of one of the pouches on his webbing. He cleaned and then dressed the wounds. His leg hurt like a
sonofabitch
and one of the wounds was a
through-and-through but he had got lucky, or at least as lucky as you can get when having sharp things pushed through your flesh. Whatever had attacked them had only pierced meat. It hadn’t
got anything vital and Chino would still be able to move.

Keeping one eye on Hank and the doorway, Chino dried off his shotgun and the Majestic revolver, which wasn’t waterproofed. He oiled both weapons as best he could but he didn’t have
the time to strip and clean them.

‘Did you recognise it?’ Hank finally asked.

‘Didn’t see enough of it, you?’

Hank shook his head. ‘It was fast, though. Definitely Ceph, you think?’

Chino laughed humourlessly. ‘Man, I don’t even want to think about there being another fucked-up alien species in New York.’

‘I guess CELL didn’t kill them all after all,’ Hank mused.

‘CELL lie? Say it ain’t so.’

Hank let out a little laugh. There wasn’t much humour in it. Chino slid two shells into the shotgun to replace the ones he’d fired. He worked the slide to make sure there was a round
in the pipe. He heard the whistle and looked around. Earl came stalking out of the mist.

‘What you see, what you hear man?’ Chino asked. Hank glanced around and then went back to keeping watch. Earl put a finger over his lips and then touched his ear.

Chino listened. He could hear the lapping of the water, a slight breeze through the branches of the trees outside. He started to shake his head and then he heard it. It sounded like a hiccough
followed by a series of clicks. He opened his mouth to say something, but Earl held his finger over his lips again. There was an answering hooting noise coming from somewhere else but both had been
close by.

‘We’re being hunted,’ Earl told him. Chino felt himself go cold. Somehow it was the more chilling because it was Earl who was telling him this. If rumours were true then Earl
had spent the last ten years off the grid, living in the wilds, self-sufficient. ‘If’n we want to move then we either go up onto the roof or back into the water, those are our
choices.’

‘We go onto the roof then we’ll get picked off by the guns,’ Hank said.

‘Only if we draw attention to ourselves,’ Chino pointed out. ‘If we keep hidden then we’ll be OK.’

‘And if we meet those things up there?’

‘So you want to go back into the water then?’

Hank gave this some thought. ‘Let’s head up to the roof.’

There was the sound of breaking glass from above them. The three soldiers looked at each other. Earl turned and led the way, heading back the direction he had come from, his weapon at the ready.
Hank fell in behind him, the butt of the MMG nestled against his shoulder. Chino followed. Checking behind them all the way.

Three floors up they found the stairway had collapsed. Earl didn’t waste time examining it, he just opened the next door he found, taking them out into an open plan office
space.

They saw half a skeleton lying close to one of the windows. Chino guessed that it had been a victim of the Manhattan Virus that had only partially liquefied. There wasn’t even much in the
way of damage, though the plant life was starting to creep in and the broken windows let in tendrils of the creeping mist.

Chino thought he heard movement below them.

‘Earl,’ Chino said quietly. There was
definitely
movement below them. He heard a crash. Now that they knew what to listen for they had been hearing more of the clicks and
hooting noises. They had seemed to be getting closer, and it sounded like they were all around them now. ‘As much as I appreciate and support your one shot, one kill ethos . . .’ There
was a sound behind them. Chino spun around, shotgun at the ready. ‘If you’ve not fought these things before then I think you should know that it might take more than one shot . .
.’

Chino caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He spun around but there was nothing. Something fell over to his left. He spun around and caught more movement but no viable target.

The door they had just came through slammed open. Chino spun back to it. He caught the shadow of a figure moving behind a partition. His finger tightened around the shotgun’s trigger but
there was still no viable target.

Behind him Earl started firing the M14 single shot, steadily and repeatedly. Next to him Hank started firing the MMG.

There
, Chino saw it! It was a tall, thin, jagged, misshapen figure, still hidden by the darkness. It looked like it was made of sharp angles. Even in the darkness, as it ran through the
tendrils of mist, he could make out the swaying tentacle. It looked like a massive rubbery tail sticking out the centre of its back.

Chino squeezed the trigger. The shotgun bucked. He was working the slide already. The creature staggered, bits flew off it. Another round chambered. The shotgun’s muzzle flash flared
again. The creature staggered but kept running. And again. The creature hit the ground and slid towards Chino, dead on the floor.

There were more sprinting at him. Chino shifted aim to his right, firing once, then again. The Ceph staggered with the impact of the first shot and the second shot knocked it out the window. He
swung to his left. Two more of the things were trying to flank them. The muzzle flash from the MMG made the aliens look like they were caught in a strobe light.

Chino fired another three rounds and the closest one dropped. He fired two more rounds from the shotgun, one hit staggering the Ceph, the other missing. Chino let the empty shotgun drop on its
sling. He moved forwards, drawing the big Majestic revolver from its holster. Aiming carefully, he squeezed the trigger. The revolver bucked in his hand. About two foot of muzzle flash leapt out of
the end of the barrel. The .50 calibre compact round hit the soft part of the Ceph and then exploded.

He hung off the gargoyle one handed, his feet against the stone of the old building. He could see the flickering light and hear the sounds. The flashes threw grotesque
shadows in their brief but repeated moments of existence. He too wanted to hunt. He wanted to hunt like a
shikari,
but he needed to find a place to worship the night sun. He wanted to see
the sky burn again. He looked around at his brothers, sadly.

‘Clear!’ Hank shouted.

‘Not fucking here it isn’t!’ Chino shouted as he fired the last shot from the Majestic. Both he and Hank spun round, exchanging positions. Hank started firing the MMG again
immediately. The machine gun’s rounds were blowing chunks out of the creatures as they leapt from desk to desk or just powered through them.

Chino flipped out the revolver’s wheel, grabbing a speed loader with six of the huge .50 calibre explosive rounds. It was faster to reload the revolver than it was the shotgun.

Earl let the M14 drop on its sling and fast drew the Mk. 23, already firing as he brought it up to eye level in a two-handed grip. In front of the sniper, five of the things lay dead or
twitching on the ground.

Chino watched in horror as Earl’s pistol rounds sparked off the charging Ceph’s armour. He flipped the revolver’s wheel closed. He knew he was going to be too slow as the Ceph
closed with Earl. It was like it was happening in slow motion. He watched the creature raise its bone-like arm blade. Earl was still firing. Chino was raising the Majestic. The alien’s bone
blade took Earl straight through the centre of his head. It shot out the back of the sniper’s skull in an explosion of bone, blood and brain matter, splattering Hank. Chino all but put the
Majestic up against the soft matter on the creature’s back and pulled the trigger. The Ceph bioform hit the ground, taking Earl’s corpse down with him and battering the body into
Hank.

Chino wanted to cry, freak out, but he’d seen this before. He knew what happened when humans tried to fight these things up close and personal. They needed to be like Dane or Alcatraz if
they were going to have a chance. If he wanted to live they needed to move. He couldn’t see an exit from this floor other than the one he’d come through, and yet more Ceph were
gathering there. He fired the massive revolver twice and one of them went down, staggering and then stumbling out the window.

He knew what they were now. The grunts had nicknamed them Stalkers. Fast-moving, close-in killers. But these ones looked different. Devolved somehow, feral. Purer. It seemed they had lost their
ability to think tactically, but now, if anything, they were faster, and hunting like a pack, albeit one with deeply suicidal tendencies.

Chino had a really stupid idea.

‘Hank, I need you to trust me and follow me!’ he shouted.

‘Where we going?’ Hank shouted back and then continued firing burst after burst.

‘Out the window. We’re going to jump to the building opposite, it’s really close,’ Chino lied. Hank didn’t answer.

Chino ran at one of the broken full-length windows. He fired the Majestic one-handed, as he ran, at the Stalker close to the window. The first shot missed. He had a moment to reflect on the
stupidity of basically charging one of these things and fired the second shot when he was practically on top of the thing. The muzzle flash illuminated its alien countenance. It staggered back but
didn’t go down, swung at Chino with its bone blade. The blade tore into Chino’s arm as he left the ground, turning him slightly in the air. His blood flew out of the wound in an arc,
looking black in the moonlight.