s [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

much about the complex as... as someone who has lived here for three years!'
'You're right, of course,' said Trask. 'With Malinari leading them, those monsters
won't be blundering around down there. They'll know exactly where they're going. Our
only advantage  that is, if we have one  lies in the fact that they don't know we're
here. Not yet, anyway.'
'Which leaves us with no room for error,' said the Necroscope. 'And no time to
spare.' He turned to Turchin. 'You first, comrade.'
And Turchin said, 'What greater sacrifice, eh? The Russian Premier gives his all
for his people, his country, his world!'
'Right,' said Jake, moving close to him. 'It'll make great headlines in Izvestia  if
we ever get out of this...'
29
THE FINAL BATTLE...?
Beyond the complex's cavernous service bay, a tunnel lined with storage rooms led to a
hatch that in turn opened on a junction of rock-hewn corridors. And from the junction
onwards  right, left, and straight on  all routes except 'down' were available. As for the
latter: a boarded-over shaft in the solid rock floor was all that remained of an earlier
stairwell to the nether levels. Wrecked in the first terrifying moments of the Perchorsk
Experiment, when shock-wave vibrations had caused bolts to shear and had reduced
the relatively flimsy structure to a heap of concertinaed scrap one hundred and ten feet
down the shaft, it had never been rebuilt. Since there were several other routes to the
core  and since in the aftermath of the disaster Perchorsk had been more or less
written off, its funding cut to the bone  repairs hadn't been deemed a priority.
In the three horizontal corridors, Karl Galich had deployed six men including
himself. Their instructions were simple: anything, but anything, that came through the
hatch  an oval door five feet high and set in a steel bulkhead  was to be cut to ribbons
with concentrated gunfire. In Galich's own words, 'I've had more than enough of
foreplay, now we fuck! And if these mothers so much as stick their noses in here I'll
have them in a crossfire. I want their blood and guts all over the walls and floor, in
payment for what they spilled outside.'
And now, from twenty-five feet away  with their electric torches and weapons
lined up on the hatch  the six waited in ambush, never suspecting that just beyond the
bulkhead, Malinari the Mind was listening to their very thoughts.
The complex was silent now. No humming from the motionless fans, no booted
feet tramping the endless corridors, no voices echoing in the still, heavy air. But it was
an ominous silence, like the dead calm that warns of a coming storm...
The hatch's locking wheel squealed as it was given a tentative turn. Then the
wheel spun and the hatch cracked open as it was hurled back on its hinges. Torch
beams stabbed at the darkness, and Galich's men took up first pressure on their
triggers. But nothing was moving in the frame of the hatch. Then
 It was mist, a corpse-white living mist that came crawling over the lower lip of
the hatch, swirling into the complex. A vampire mist, coiling across the floor, and
thickening as it came; until the hatch itself was obscured, its outline fading, swallowed
up in the total opacity of the stuff.
It took only a matter of seconds for Galich to realise what was happening here 
exactly the same thing that had happened outside and then he drew breath and yelled,
'Open fire! Into the mist. Fire right into this... this whatever it is!'
And his men needed no further urging. Sensing something of the alien otherness,
as their skin began crawling, they were only too glad to oblige. And the clamour was
deafening as they blasted away at the place where they believed the hatch to be; or
rather, they hosed fire on an area that Vavara's beguiling talent had told them was the
hatch. But it wasn't. And suddenly the four men in the corridors that angled to left and
right of the hatch had adjusted their aim to target each other!
The firing commenced... and as quickly ceased. And in its wake there was only
the hot stench of cordite and fresh blood, slumping shadows and choked screams
gurgling into silence.
But in the straight-on corridor, Galich and his second-in-command were unhurt.
And:
'What the fuck is going on?' Galich whispered as he loaded a fresh magazine into
his machine pistol, his hands shaking so badly that he could scarcely draw back the
cocking lever.
And his second-in-command said, 'This mist is like... it's like living slime. Karl, I
can feel it crawling on me!'
And in that same moment  from directly above them  Lord Szwart said,
'Ahhhh!' as he came seeping down from the ceiling.
Semi-solid one moment, in the next Szwart was muscle, bone, chitin claws and
mantrap jaws; and wrenching the Russians' weapons from their nerveless fingers, he
hurled them aside and slammed the pair up against opposite walls. Half stunned, they
would have fallen... but Vavara and Lord Nephran Malinari were there, flowing out of the
vampire mist, their eyes burning and their overly long arms reaching out with irresistible
strength. And:
'This one,' said Malinari, sniffing at Galich with a wrinkled snout, his fingers
writhing like snakes as they grasped the ex-convict's head, 'is mine! One of their
leaders, he knows all the mazy ways of this place. He has learned them by heart. Now,
in just a little while, I shall learn them, too.' [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]