Syberian Sunrise (9 page)

“Come on,” Ramirez whispered harshly.

Enzo stepped through. Something about that glow made him uncomfortable. Flanking him on either side were rows of human-sized containers. The glow was emanating from them, well, some of them. There were dozens of them, they lined the entire wall, from floor to ceiling, stacked atop each other. Rows and columns of the coffins, three high, something like thirty across. Enzo stopped again, briefly stricken by the sight.

“This is where they keep the test subjects, I guess,” Ramirez said quietly.

“Where do they get them from?” Enzo murmured, turning and approaching the nearest one that was still light. Less than a quarter of them still had light. He figured that meant that those were the only ones with live people inside.

“I don't know for sure. I heard rumors that they were raiding prison transports, you know, guys that were already convicted anyway. I imagine they'd cover it up, make up some sort of story. But,” he shrugged, “I don't know for sure.”

“I do,” Enzo murmured.

“You do?”

“I was on a prison transport, hitchhiking, before I woke up here. This is where I must have been. Eve said the only way to get me out of my tube was to put me down into the furnace,” Enzo murmured, staring at the person inside.

It was a man, and only his head and shoulders were visible through the glass. He was floating in liquid, a breathing mask hooked up to his face, as well as several wires. This was how he must have looked, Enzo realized with a shudder.

“We should help them,” Ramirez said suddenly. “I mean, we can't just leave them like this.”

“Yes, we can,” Enzo replied. “We need to get out of here.”

Ramirez frowned, clearly unhappy with the response. Enzo sighed and tried to play the diplomat. “They're safer in there. You really want a couple dozen naked, confused prisoners following us around?” he asked.

Ramirez thought about it, but still seemed unsatisfied.

Enzo sighed again. “Fine, I'll call Eve. But if we can't figure a way to get them out, then we're leaving. Or, more importantly,
I'm
leaving.”

“Fine,” Ramirez replied.

Enzo fired the radio up. He spent a moment trying to get in touch with Eve, but still received no reply. Nothing, not even the soft whisper of static. He was beginning to suspect that the thing had been broken somehow.

“See? Nothing,” Enzo said. “Let's go.”

Ramirez reluctantly followed him out of the darkened room and into another corridor. They moved silently down it. Enzo was still toying with the idea of simply staying put on the current level and exploring, but his shoulder was starting to bug him again and he was getting a bad feeling from the area. He was still weighing his options when they stepped out of the corridor and came into the next room, where Ramirez said they could escape through.

“Uh oh,” Ramirez said quietly, freezing up, raising his rifle.

Enzo had to agree with that assessment. The room he'd come to was vast, warehouse-sized. The walls were lined with cages of unbreakable glass and steel in a grid pattern, going all the way up to the ceiling. A handful of surgery bays occupied the center of the room, in between the ranked rows of the cages. Most of them were open, emptied and bloodied. Only a handful were left occupied by a scant few Mutants and Slugs.

“This is where they keep the specimens,” Enzo murmured.

“Yeah, and I've got some bad news. More cages are open now than before, when I first came through here,” Ramirez replied.

As he said it, a low growl cut through the area. From all across the room, behind surgical bays, emerging from shadows and open doorways, a pack of Harvesters came for them. These ones were lean and mean, not yet having had a chance to feast on the flesh of the dead. Enzo counted four, then six, then a dozen altogether.

“Shit,” he muttered, looking down at his pistol.

“Back up towards the door, take them out,” Ramirez murmured.

They began backing up and raised their weapons. As one, the pack of Harvesters began racing across the room towards them. Enzo took aim, zeroing the digital sights on the hideous face of the dog mutation nearest to him. He fired once, missed, cursed and fired again. This shot took it right between the eyes, causing its head to erupt in a plume of crimson gore. He could hear Ramirez firing three-round bursts beside him.

Enzo aimed and fired again, putting down a second horror as it raced for him. His hands were steady, his gaze sharp. He'd done this, (well, not
exactly
this, but something like it), hundreds, if not thousands of times at this point in his life. It was just a new enemy. The Harvesters growled and snapped their razor teeth together as they charged, navigating the layout of the room. One of them leaped at Enzo.

He tracked it with his pistol and shot it twice in the chest, then ducked as the inert body continued flying towards him. As he came back up, another one was leaping for him, its jaws open. Without any other recourse, he raised his right arm. The beast latched onto it, the teeth biting down into the metal. Enzo grunted as he was thrown onto his back, the creature coming with him. He aimed the pistol and fired three times in rapid succession, hitting it point blank in the face and reducing its entire head to so much free flying gore.

Shaking off what was left of its teeth, he let out a startled shout as he spied yet another flying through the air towards him. He heard a barrage of gunfire and the Harvester let out a howl as it was hit. Enzo rolled, barely getting out of the way in time. He scrambled hastily to his feet and reloaded, looking around, ready for more.

The Harvesters were dead.

“Damn,” he muttered, tossing the spent magazine aside.

“Yeah, you're telling me,” Ramirez replied.

They took a moment to make sure nothing else was creeping up on them, then moved through the specimen storage room and out of it, coming to another antechamber that led to several other sections of the underground research facility.

“Now what?” Enzo asked.

Ramirez pointed up, to an open vent grate overhead.

“This is how I came through, I...” he paused. “Do you...do you smell something?” he asked, then he staggered. “What the hell?” he muttered.

Enzo suddenly felt tired and lightheaded. He took a step, but his foot seemed to not go where he wanted it to. He became aware of a slight green haze to the room and noticed that the air was beginning to smell funny.

“Gas!” he snapped.

“I...” Ramirez abruptly collapsed into a heap.

Enzo heard a door open. His eyes were closing, his muscles failing to respond. The pistol slipped from his fingers, hit the floor.

Someone else had come into the room.

They were saying something.

Enzo collapsed as the darkness took him.

* * * * *

Enzo came awake with a start.

The first thing he noticed was that he was lying on his back. The second being that he had been secured to whatever it was he was lying on. There were people around, they were talking. His shoulder was hurting, a slow burning sensation, pulsing deep in the muscle. He wanted some more morphine, at least some painkillers, fucking
something
.

“I see our subjects are awake,” someone said, a female voice.

The voice sounded like cruelty came easy.

“Let me up,” Enzo replied.

“Shut up,” the woman replied.

He raised his head and looked around. The room he was in was medical in nature, a handful of examination tables taking up the center, shelves and counters running along the perimeter. Ramirez was similarly strapped down to the table next to him. Half a dozen people stood around. Four of them wore full-body black armor, their faces hidden behind visors. The fifth one, the woman talking, wore the same armor, but her helmet was off. She had a shaved head, pallid skin and brilliantly glowing white eyes. She was sneering at him.

The final person in the room was a tall, scrawny man in a white bio-hazard suit. His dark hair was long and unkempt, sticking up and out in places, his eyes a glowering electric blue. He was staring at an infopad, distracted by something.

“I can't believe we were lucky enough to snag one of you fucking jackoffs,” the woman said, now staring at Ramirez.

“Director Fielding,” Ramirez replied. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Continuing our research, obviously. What else would we be doing?” Fielding snapped her fingers. One of mystery men in dark armor turned and walked across the room. A moment later he returned with a squirming Slug firmly grasped in both hands.

He came to stand between the two of them.

Enzo saw that the other man, who looked like he might have been a scientist, was now playing extremely close attention.

“Which one?” the man asked, his voice coming through a mechanical filter.

“Him. The
soldier
,” Fielding replied with contempt. “I don't know what it is with you fucking Marines and the government, always sticking their nose where it doesn't belong.”

The Dark Ops man turned and began lowering the Slug towards Ramirez's mouth. Enzo watched in fascinated horror, his stomach twisting. He'd seen a lot of shit in his time, but nothing quite like this. He tried to break free of the things holding him down, but they wouldn't give. Ramirez closed his mouth firmly. One of the other men came over, grabbed his jaw and forced it open. He began screaming, which quickly was muffled as they introduced the Slug to his mouth. It slithered into the opening. His muffled screams became gags.

Enzo watched the young man's throat bulge and twist as the Slug forced its way down it. Ramirez thrashed around violently, fighting against his restraints. The two soldiers held his head down and kept his mouth closed after the Slug had fully disappeared from view. Ramirez continued struggling for several more minutes. As time wore on, his struggles began to cease, until he stopped moving entirely. The pair of soldiers stepped away.

“Fascinating,” the scientist whispered. “That never gets old.”

“Get him ready for testing,” Fielding snapped. “And bring me another one,” she said, her gaze shifting to Enzo.

If he was going to do something, it had to be now. He looked around, trying to find a way out. Maybe he might be able to use the extra strength from his artificial limb, but he wasn't sure. Maybe...something moved overhead. He flicked his gaze to it and caught it at a glance. Someone was overhead, in an open ventilation hatch. It looked like they were getting ready to drop something into the room.

Enzo readied himself, focusing on the Slug as not to give away the position of the other person. One of the troopers was bringing over another Slug. He began to lower it towards Enzo's mouth. Something landed in the room.

“What was that?”

There was a gunshot directly before there was a blinding flash of light and an ear-rupturing sound. Enzo felt his right arm loosen up. Whoever it was must have shot the restraining strap. Blinded and deafened, he brought his arm up and freed his left hand. Working quickly, he undid the straps holding his feet into place and stood up. His hearing began to return, but not before he smelled the ungodly stench of a nearby Mutant.

One or more of them must have gotten into the room. He stumbled about the room, hearing people shouting, a few gunshots going off through a muffled haze. He kept going until he hit a wall, then felt his way along it until he'd found a control panel. His vision and hearing began to return as he opened the door and slipped through. A hazy corridor was waiting for him. Enzo rushed down it, going through the door at the end and coming to a much larger, open corridor.

There were Mutants there, moving around, one of them dragging a corpse.

He turned in the opposite direction and sprinted away, leaving the sounds of combat behind. After a dozen meters, he found a door and opened it up. A small infirmary awaited his inspection. Enzo looked around, found no one and nothing else inside and closed and locked the door behind him. He stumbled across the room to another door at the back. Opening it, he found vacant closet. He went in and shut the door behind him.

For a long moment, he did nothing, just waited. He was afraid, although he wouldn't have admitted it to anyone else. But the fear was like a mechanism, a machine terror that came when near death situations happened to him. Of course, this was a lot different than getting shot at. Having an alien organism forced down your throat was a pretty bad to way to go. He waited ten minutes for his hearing and vision to fully return. Whoever it had been had used a flash-bang and had saved his life. He wondered if they were still alive.

When he felt capable, Enzo stood and left the closet. There was still nothing in the infirmary. He stood there for a moment, wondering what to do next. He was back to square one, no weapons, no allies. No real idea of what to do. Even his radio was gone. Enzo considered the situation for a long moment, then his eyes fell on a workstation at the back of the room. He moved over to it, sat down and booted the thing up.

As he suspected, the workstation had an intercom system. He opened it up and looked through the list of other workstations he could connect to. Where had they said Eve was? In Command or Control or something...he finally found one labeled Control Room and accessed it. He called out and immediately received a response.