The Aeschylus (40 page)

It felt too quiet. He thought he could see movement out along the edge of the sea, and he reached for the flare gun at his waist. Popping a round into the chamber, he looked up and down the beach. “Fuck it,” he said, and fired a round over the sands.

What he saw in the glow, some thirty feet away, was not a shape or an animal or a single member of the Black Shadow team. What he saw was an army of Carrion, a swarm of blackened figures, all padding up the shore as if some greater intelligence had commanded them not to be heard. The one in the lead was not Mason, but a disfigured, burned man AJ barely recognized. His skin was blotchy-black, his stomach cut and distended as if with child. The figure opened its mouth and shrieked.

And then they were all sprinting up the shore, tumbling and spitting and hissing as they ran towards him.

His body fell in a mass of arms and legs, rolling into the sand. Then all at once he was up, dashing towards the hole in the fence. He could hear their horrible footsteps behind him, splashing through the water as they ran up the beach. His mind flashed to Kate, to Dutch, to what he could do to protect them. What
could
he do with those things coming? He found himself screaming their names, calling to them as his feet pounded dirt. He stopped and fired a round from his rifle into the oncoming crowd, but it had no effect. They kept coming, sprinting and hurtling and charging up the beach.

Before he had time to breathe, he threw himself onto his back and pushed himself through the hole. Kate was standing on the other side, holding the submachine gun like she didn't know what to do with it.

“Can you fire that thing?”

She nodded, her eyes wide and blank.

Dutch stumbled from the prisoners' bunker carrying one of the Karabiners. AJ saw his friend had outfitted it with a German sniper scope and was about to ask him what the hell he was doing, when Dutch raised the rifle and fired. The first figure to make it through the hole fell at AJ's feet. Half a dozen more were crawling over his body before anyone could blink.

“Kate!” he yelled.

She pulled the trigger of her weapon, but there was only a click.

“Pull the lever!” he yelled. “Pull it!”

She fumbled with the cocking handle, her hands shaking so badly she couldn't get her fingers on it. AJ fired his rifle, taking one of the figures in the shoulder. Another leapt through the fence and charged straight for him. AJ cried out, but his voice was drowned in a hail of gunfire. The MP38 roared to life,
slamming his attacker backwards and then chewing a line through the oncoming horde. They dropped like cattle, falling to the ground in a spray of black blood. A few of them kept coming on their bellies, crawling with their arms outstretched. Recovering, AJ walked over and shot the closest one in the head, then did the same to the next figure, and the next. When he was sure they weren't getting up, he grabbed Kate by the arm.

“You okay?”

She nodded, her eyes still swimming. Her left hand reached to touch the muzzle of the gun, as if she couldn't believe what she had done. She yanked her fingers back; the metal burned hot. “I've never shot anyone before.”

“You still haven't. Those things aren't people. Now, I want you to reload. Don't panic, all right? Think.”

“I don't know if I can—”

“Reload!”

As soon as she was finished, a bizarre look crossed her face. She looked back and forth, then dropped the gun and began jogging towards the other end of the base. Dutch shot AJ a glance, and both of them were about to start yelling when they saw what she was doing.

At the gaps in the walls, the Germans had placed strategic artillery cannons, 10.5cm Howitzers, the kinds with the long barrels on two wheels. They could have been used to repel a naval attack, had anyone cared enough to take the island by sea.
Guess the joke's on them
, AJ thought, wondering how surprised they must have been when Carrion ran through the
inside
gates.

“Help me!” Kate said. She had begun trying to pick up one the rear beams. The cannons could be pushed like a wheelbarrow, but only if you had four strong men... or a truck. When AJ looked at her, her eyes narrowed. “You told me to think, so I'm thinking! We have to plug that hole or they'll overwhelm us. Now help me!”

AJ lifted one of the legs, but the thing wouldn't budge. It was like pushing a semi. Then, Dutch was there. He grabbed the
spare support, and by inches, the thing began to move. It went slowly at first, and then it began to pick up speed. The three of them jogged towards the hole, backs straining and legs heaving. AJ wondered if the women who lifted wrecked cars off of their babies felt the same kind of adrenaline.

Just as they reached the hole, the naked thing emerged from it, the thing that had once been Christian. It whooped a single, bone-chilling howl.

“Keep going!” AJ yelled. “Run through it!”

They barreled into the man-thing, and it fell backwards, the cannon toppling after. One wheel crushed the body where its testicles should have been, and it hissed at them, its tongue black and vermicular.

AJ approached the hole with his gun in hand, intending to finish it off. Then, he saw what was really in its stomach. Mason, who had known the man was useless, had stuffed him full of grenades.

“Get back!” he yelled. “Get back!”

The powder caught less than a second later. AJ felt his feet leave the ground, his body hurtling upwards and then slamming into dirt. When he looked up, he saw his two friends were kneeling next to a bunker unharmed. The walls near the fence, however, were blasted to chunks. So was Christian, who by all accounts, was now liquid at room temperature.

AJ stood and coughed. The fence was in ruin, the metal melted and the barbed wire in disarray. The wire would keep the three of them from getting out, but he had a feeling it wouldn't do much to keep The Carrion from getting in.

“We're trapped,” he said. “Mason just sacrificed his best man to keep us trapped in here.”

His hands fell to his knees, and he bent to catch his breath. He felt anger and despair tugging at him and refused to give in. When he looked up, he saw Kate had another one of those bizarre smiles. She was looking at the front gate, the place clogged and overgrown with black tendrils. He could see the calculation in her eyes. Before he could ask her what she was thinking, an ear-splitting cry thundered across the landscape. It
was as if a thousand inhuman voices had sensed the time of the blitzkrieg was at hand.

The Island:

February, 1939

The cry echoing across the landscape stopped Harald cold. There had been an explosion, and then... then a vast and terrible shriek unlike anything he had ever heard.

“Let me go!” Lucja screamed. He still had a hold of her hair.

“Shut up.”

He looked beyond the girl to the vast expanse of the pit. The explosion had been behind them, but the cry—that horrible, shrieking sound—that had come from crater. His mind flashed upon the instant when Richter had lowered his prisoner into the darkness, and how when he pulled the rope back, there was nothing there. The pit had claimed him as a sacrifice, but sacrifice or not, whatever unholy gods lay at the bottom were no longer satisfied.

As he peered over the edge, he saw something move. The shape that came crawling up looked like an abstraction of man rather than a man itself, as if it had been splattered onto canvas with a broken pen. He watched as it worked its way up the incline, its fingernails breaking against the crater's face. When Lucja saw it, she stopped struggling, her mouth agape.

Harald shot the figure in the head, and when it didn't fall, he shot it again. He emptied his clip, watching the thing
stumble backwards and topple over the edge from whence it had come.

When it was gone, the girl struck him. “Bastard! Let me go!”

Doing his best to ignore her, he ejected the clip from his pistol and searched his jacket for another. With Lucja yanking on him, he couldn't seem to find one. Or maybe in the struggle, it had fallen out.

Had he ever thought she was pretty? By God, she looked like a mad woman.

Harald brought the butt of his gun down upon her head, and she stopped struggling, her face slackening in bovine anguish. Then, her eyes cleared, and she was clawing at him again. She yanked against his hand, threatening to rip her own hair out to be free. Months of meager rations were no match for Harald's well-fed muscles though, and he held her fast.

“Stop it.”

“Let me go!”

“First, you will stop thrashing like a fool. You are mine, do you hear me? You will stay with me.”

“Let me go!”

He thought about calling her a Judas, a terrible inbred traitor, but he didn't. Instead, he simply said, “No.”

And then, she started to cry. Large, angry tears welling up in those hazel eyes. Those mongrel's eyes.

Harald used his gun to raise her chin. “I told you to stop it.” He hoped to see some kind of shame in that face, some kind of regret, but he didn't. He saw only rage.

“Help me!” she called up the hill. “I'm down here! Somebody help me!”

Following her gaze, he saw the motorcycle parked up the main path. Its rider was somewhere close.

“Hello up there!” he called. “We have a prisoner trying to escape!” When he got no reply, he pulled the girl towards it.

They were halfway there when he stepped into a rut and lost his balance. Lucja tried to pull away but succeeded only in pulling him down on top of her. They fell in a heap, the back of her head striking the ground. He tried to pull her up, but
she was dazed. Was it a trick? He wouldn't have believed her capable of such a thing the day before, but Richter would have warned him better. If he hadn't been so alone, if he hadn't been so weakened by the loss of Mieke, maybe he could have seen it.

The girl went to bite Harald's hand, but her strength gave out, and the hand dropped to her breast. He wondered if, on a subconscious level, this was what she wanted. She had been away from home for months now, and that was good time spent away from all the schoolboys she could have been tempting with her filthy, sideways cunny.

“Is this what you want?” he asked, mashing her nipple. “Is it?”

She cried out, another fake tear dribbling down her cheek.

He squeezed again, and she cried harder. It was cold out here, but her breath was hot. The space between her legs was hot. He could feel it, even through his leather gloves.

How was this girl, this filthy mongrel of a girl having this effect on him? He could feel his cock jutting into his pants, so stiff it was painful. It was drowning his every sensation, even the fear of what was surely coming from the pit.

He slapped the girl again and felt another dizzying throb, almost losing himself.

“Don't,” she whispered.

Something clunked up by the motorcycle, and it was enough to bring him back to his senses. He pushed himself off of the girl and began searching his coat for the spare magazine again. He found it this time, sighing as he pulled it out and slapped it into the gun. As he turned, Lucja reared back on her hind quarters and kicked him straight in the balls.

“
This is for my mother, you sonofabitch!
” she screamed. “
And for all the things you'd do to me! Do you hear me?
”

The blow landed full-force, not even a flinch to break the impact. The pistol went off, kicking up dust next to her head.

A third figure came striding down the incline towards them, its silhouette tall and gangly. The outline of a Luger was visible in the shadow. “You've done enough,” it said. “Get away from her.”

Harald squinted through the darkness. Around him, he could hear hissing and scuttling as more of the creatures began to crawl up from out of the darkness. “She's mine!” he called. “Who are you?”

“Odysseus.” The figure paused a moment, then shot Harald in the leg, just above the knee.

Blood splashed across his hips, and he dropped his pistol, forgetting all about the pain in his crotch.

“Goodbye, Lieutenant.”

The figure offered a hand to the girl, and she took it. Together, they began running up the hill, back towards the bike.

As they reached the crest, Harald tried to push himself to his feet and couldn't. “No!” he yelled. “You won't leave me like this! Come back! Come back you filthy Mongoloid inbreds!”

The sound of the slithering army grew louder. There were more figures like the one Harald shot, a lot more. They were emerging at the corners of his vision, still slimed from the bowels of the earth.

“Come back!
Goddamn you!
”

He felt something grab his uninjured leg and begin to tug. Thrashing, he spun and searched the ground for his pistol, but it was lost in the dirt. The thing behind him began to tug harder.

No
, he thought.
I deserve a better end than this!

A terrible gurgling sound emerged from somewhere deep in his throat. He kept yelling as they dragged him all the way down to the edge of the pit and into the blackness beyond.

Linus Metzger was dozing on guard duty when the explosion rocketed through the garage doors and tore the tower supports out of the ground beneath him. He had enough time to wonder if he was still asleep—having one of those falling dreams—when the tower smashed into the ground, and he was flung through the inside like a top. His arm collided with the
wall (ceiling), and he heard something snap. In his mind, it was almost as loud as the explosion.

He blacked out but came to a moment later when a gunshot echoed somewhere outside the base. Forcing himself to sit up, he took stock of his surroundings. The tower wasn't destroyed, but the top half was overturned, resting sideways on the ground. Linus managed to push himself out through one of the side walls feeling, by all accounts, like the world was crumbling around him. His arm lay bent at the wrong angle, though he felt no pain. He was vaguely aware that his ears were ringing.

When he peered across the landscape, he was greeted by the caliginous terrain, the world beyond the walls disappearing into space. Then, on the horizon, he saw a headlight. That light had to be Eichmann coming back from his patrol of the perimeter. But there was something wrong. It was moving too fast, and... and there was something chasing it.