Terminus: A Novella of the Apocalypse (16 page)

Craning my neck, I measure the distance between us, our rate of escape and their rate of approach, and then I turn my head to gauge the likeliness that we will beat them to the top of the ramp.  Immediately, I understand this is a one-sided contest, and we have no hope of winning.

Having survived the first Terminus signal and multiple encounters with Terminal cases since, I know such a death is never easy or painless.  With their bare fingers, nails and teeth, they will literally rip us apart.  Only these thoughts spur us forward, but we both know it must be too little to save us.

My chest heaving and my breath burning through overtaxed lungs, I gasp and wheeze to drag her along.  After all we have endured together, I will not abandon her, though I know I might make the distance alone.  Grimly, I vow to die with her, if need be.

In the same instant, my chest swells strangely.  I realize I have come to love her passionately.

With a final twist of my neck, I turn to see a half-dozen insane Enterprisers nearing close enough at our backs to get their grips on us, even as the score remaining near the wheels turn on one another to tear each other apart first.  Even as several expire beneath those massive tires and the rest bash, beat, strangle, rip and pummel each other, I know we will not escape the nearest six.  They are sufficiently focused on our flight to avoid destruction at the hands of each other, and I know we are doomed.

Dropping her arm, we spin to make our final stand.  I am startled to see she has returned her big knife to its blood-caked scabbard, but I suppose her left arm has exhausted its stamina and is of no further use.

Flexing my knees and bringing my raw knuckles up to a fighting stance, from the corner of my eye I watch her gore-streaked left hand disappear into her voluminous purse.  Without taking the time to retract it, since no such time remains, I hear a loud POP!  This echoes immediately back and forth from the sprawled walls of the ramp and sets my ears to ringing painfully.

In rapid succession, four more rounds go off and five holes punch through the thick leather of the handbag, each smoking and rimmed in black.  The four closest Terminal cases drop face first onto the concrete ramp, blood spewing like crimson geysers from massive exit wounds in their backs.  I jump, startled, with the sound of each gunshot.

Now The Girl jacks the massive forty-four magnum out of her purse and, with an expert snap of her left hand, opens the cylinder to sling spent shells wide.  In the same motion, her right hand jabs into the purse and then emerges again with a speed-loader.  As she works furiously to push this into place and twist it open to seat fresh rounds into the cylinder, I stagger upright to catch my relieved breath.

Though I expect them, the next three shots still make me jump.  The last two lunatics collapse onto the running pump of their knees, dead before they strike the deck.

I am momentarily shocked to note the last of these is none other than our chief of police, his crazed face battered, bruised and etched from the parallel drag of desperate fingernails across his cheeks.  Choking on his own blood, he dies at our feet, his knuckleduster-encased fists lashing out spasmodically to the last pulse of his failing heartbeat.

With two shots to spare in her pistol’s five-round cylinder, I again drape her right arm over my shoulder as we return to our headlong flight up the ramp, our heads on swivels.  Fortunately for us, we note how the remaining Enterprisers have become completely distracted by each other.  Those who escape the squeaking-squealing tires of the mammoth spacecraft will quickly succumb to the assault of their mates.

Lumbering after us, the huge spacecraft presses inexorably forward.  Nearing the top of the ramp now, a new concern confronts us.

The façade of the deceptively squat building overhead forms yet another set of hangar doors.  These are completely closed and locked, so I have no hope of manually spinning them open.

We arrive in that final space and slow to a stop, panting and heaving for breath, exhausted and spent by our harrowing escape.  Desperately, we cast about for a means of freeing the spacecraft, but find nothing here to inform us.

Through the gunshot-ring of our diminished capacity to hear, we take note of a scramble of footsteps.  To our left from a location near where we previously cut through the entryway wall, a pair of bloodthirsty Enterprisers fight each other to the death, so fully engaged in their mutual attempt to destroy one another that they have failed to take note of our approach.

Exchanging a curious gaze with The Girl, we approach the struggle in the half-lit darkness, her clinging to my support to limp alongside and me wheezing desperately to catch my breath.  Still, the two flailing ghouls fail to respond to our presence.  When we get close enough to see them clearly in the diminished light, we witness the ruination each has made of the other.  One has lost an eye while the other suffers from a massive tear to one corner of his mouth.  Both are bruised, scratched, and badly damaged.  They roll on the concrete deck, grunting and hissing and growling, but otherwise making no sound save for the clatter and drag of their boots and clothing across the floor, which is punctuated by the soft, wet sounds of blows and slaps.

Now we notice the reason they had been stationed here before the second Terminus signal misdirected them.  Following a bundle of wires upward along the threshold of the hangar doorframe, I see finger-pressed mounds of beige putty deliberately shaped into a half-sphere atop one of the toaster-sized mounts of the outer most door panel.  The wires continue up into the darkness, where I see another mound of putty fixed atop another of the mounts.  At our feet, I trace another thicker run of wires stretched across the threshold and into the darkness on the far side of the sprawling chamber.

My badly rattled brain struggles to make sense of this new development.  Squinting my eyes to focus them, I re-trace the wires back to their source on a panel of plywood.  Like a pegboard, it presents a patchwork of plugs on its forward aspect, each of which connects in the rear to one set of wires.  I guess each set of wires then coil away into the shadows to a detonator pushed into the center of one of those small hemispheres of putty.

Each of the plugs on the board attach to a central control box by yet another short run of wires.  This, in turn, connects them to a black box at the center of it all.  A green light flashes there.

While the two crazed Enterprisers continue to roll and tussle back and forth nearby, I turn a wild eye on The Girl.  “It’s wired for remote demolition,” I gasp, drawing this conclusion even as I speak these words.

Slowly lifting the pistol, she pumps the final two rounds into that struggling mass, one for each skull.  Leaving her side, I fumble to search their clothing while trying to avoid the arc and flow of blood, which surges from their heads in diminishing pulses with each beat of their dying hearts.  Once more, that massive spacecraft creeps up the ramp toward yet another impenetrable barricade, and I realize the new challenge will be firing those charges while sufficient distance separates the blast from its vulnerable hull.

When I feel a hard lump the size of a cigarette pack in the breast pocket of one of the dead troopers, I work with numb fingers to unsnap the pocket flap to free the device inside, which I hope will prove to be the remote trigger for the pegboard.  Snatching this up, I turn it to examine it, wiping it free of blood.  A yellow light flashes above a clear plastic tab that seals a single button beneath it, protecting it from an inadvertent contact.

Taking this with me, I push myself into the drape of The Girl’s accommodating right arm, and I lead her through the jagged hole we previously cut into the wall.  With a desperate, limping jog, we make way through the outer personnel door into the dim light of early evening, squinting and blinking for the pain in our eyes.

Rather than charge directly across the lot toward our abandoned truck and the lone Strangler milling around nearby, I drag the girl hard to our left and then immediately around the corner of the building.  Several paces along that wall, I push her to the ground, drop on top of her and lift the remote before my twitching gaze.

When I snap the catch on the clear plastic tab and lift it, the light switches from an amber flash to a green flash.  Now it beeps rhythmically with each luminous pulse.  Etched into the plastic housing around the LED in tiny print, I see the words ‘Armed when Amber’ stamped above it, and the words ‘Ready when Green’ below it.

With a hopeful jab of my thumb, I push it.  The result is forceful and immediate, though somewhat understated.  Immaculately choreographed through the pegboard, each shaped charge ignites with a deliberate timing, first simultaneously opening each of the threshold mounts and then effortlessly pushing the massive panels forward onto the concrete apron.

After the last charge ignites, we rise to our knees and then our feet to hobble toward the corner of the building.  We arrive there just in time to watch those massive doors leaning forward as one piece from their base.  I see they will topple flat across the concrete, but I suspect the impact will not pass without danger.

Glancing up as I again pull The Girl back to safety behind the building wall, I watch the startled Strangler take note of the explosions.  At the same time, we detect a protesting groan and shriek of tortured metal as the hangar door panels slowly rotate forward on a rising crescendo of mechanical ruination.

The sound of their impact with the ground is deafening.  It jars our bones and assaults our ears painfully.  We feel the ground rattle beneath us, and a great gout of dust, sand and debris billows past us, around the corner to ultimately fade into the desert.

While we recover from this latest auditory assault, our tormented ears reveal a familiar squeak-squeal of rubber passing over concrete.  Those giant thrusters emerge into the light, followed by the rearmost aspect of the huge spacecraft and then the remainder of its hull, which reveals itself to the world with an inexorable crawl, meter upon meter.

Those three-meter-tall tires bounce and squelch as they roll onto and then over the relatively flat door panels, crushing them underfoot like thin wafers that offer minimal resistance.  Satisfied that no obstacles remain, but well aware of the likelihood that a crazed mob of Terminal cases will soon follow the spacecraft out of the hangar, I once again drape The Girl’s arm over my shoulders to lead her in a limping run around the collapsed doors and the juggernaut spacecraft noisily crushing them to our right.

As we approach the truck, the last Strangler sees us.  His maniacal face hidden by the shadow of his hood, the crow charges us, growling like a dog.  Wearily The Girl lifts the pistol and squeezes its single-action trigger.  The cylinder turns as the hammer jacks backward and then falls with a stunning ‘CLICK’.

Gently pushing her away until she can support herself without falling, I limp forward to duck the whistle-snap of the crow’s lightning quick garrote.  Then I pummel him with a rapid series of jabs.  Exhausted from the afternoon’s savage work, my blows fall with much less force than is required to subdue my opponent, who absorbs each with a Terminus-inspired durability that is truly distressing to see.

Then he somehow snaps that twisted length of leather around my neck before I can catch it with numb, abraded fingers.  For all my ebbing strength and desperate breathlessness, my vision very quickly begins to fade as I struggle to free myself.  A black ring, darkness closes from the peripheral regions of my dimming sight towards its center, and I feel a comforting sense of relief pouring through my veins with its python-like strangle.

Before I can lapse completely into unconsciousness, the crow gasps, groans, and stiffens behind me.  He falls forward onto my back, pinning me beneath him.  I feel a terribly warm flow of thick liquid pouring around by back along both sides of my rib cage.  Panting, I await the return of my vision, as The Girl removes her Bowie knife from the man’s heart via his shoulder blade.

Rolling him off of me, she helps me to my feet one-handed, and then she taps my shoulder urgently.  When my senses return to some semblance of order, I follow the jut of her right forefinger to find the truck.

Spending the last of my stamina, I somehow manage to jump onto its running board and pull myself up to its cab with a twinned grasp of its door handle and steering wheel.  Inside, I drop into its seat and immediately twist its key and then press its ignition button as she limps around to the passenger side door and struggles to pull herself up there.  I lean across the seat to aid her attempt with a grasp rendered slippery and uncertain by a greasy combination of blood and sweat, and then we return to sitting positions, locking the doors beside us.  Through the mesh of a metal grate bolted over the front windshield, we watch that ponderous spacecraft roll onto the concrete apron before us.

Struggling to catch our breath and awed by the sight of such a large piece of machinery moving so easily, we sit beside each other and marvel.  For the first time, we see it fully exposed in the light.  Its fuselage is wider than a jumbo jet, though shorter.  It has no real wings, but offers only a few stubby fins arranged periodically along its length.  The shadow-bound mouths of three huge, round thrusters occupy most of our vision, as these have preceded it out of the hangar with its backward roll.  When the spacecraft at last jolts to a halt, those massive nozzles tower overhead, and the twin rows of tires threaten to flatten us.

The Girl leans across the seat to shake me out of my mesmerized reverie.  Pointing, she makes the obvious clear to me.  In the next few seconds, either the nearest row of heavy tires will smash us flat, or the blast from those nozzles will flash fry us.  If this evidence were not sufficient to encourage our departure, we watch forty or fifty crazed Terminal cases spill out onto the apron around the base of the spacecraft.  I ultimately realize the time has come to leave.