James Axler – Cold Asylum

He wriggled down, giving himself a view of a lot more of the winding passage beyond. To the left there seemed to be a blank wall, but to the right he was able to see for fifty or sixty yards. The strip lights in the curved ceiling gave a bright, flat illumination, and the two vid cameras that Michael could spot had both pivoted to point away from him, as though they were reacting to the oncoming noise.

It was definitely some living creature, and it was moving fast in his direction, as though it had somehow heard, or sensed, the opening of the double door. Michael didn’t have anything like the fighting reflexes of the others, or their highly developed awareness of impending danger. But he began to think that whatever he’d disturbed might not be friendly.

Just as he was about to get up, he glimpsed it.

For a near-fatal moment the young man was paralyzed by the sight, unable at first to see quite what it was, and then unable to believe the evidence of his own eyes.

It was a kind of lizard, sort of a snake, with a ruff of spiky fur around its throat and long claws on each of its six legs. The body was about eight feet in length, colored a dirty white. A long tail whipped back and forth at incredible speed, seeming to help propel it toward Michael. The eyes were like scarlet golf balls on protruding tubes, and there were at least eight of them. The head was as pointed as a prairie rattler’s and seemed, in that first ghastly glimpse, to be almost entirely mouth. Michael had just enough time to see that the triple-mutie creature had several rows of thin, needled teeth, hanging over its bleached lips.

“Mother of God!” He scrambled to his knees, heaving himself up by the green lever, inadvertently pulling it downward, setting off the release mechanism that would lock the doors.

The gap immediately began to shrink, but with an agonizing slowness that made the youth start to scream.

One inch less.

Two.

The noise was now on top of him, overlaid with a mindlessly ferocious hissing that nearly made Michael pass out in a panic.

Three.

He realized that he should have run for the gateway chamber and slammed the door shut on the horror, and he would have been safe and on his way out of this place.

Now it was too late.

The thing was partly under the door, its front legs scrabbling at the floor as it sought to thrust itself all the way through. One of the eyes was knocked off in the struggle, the severed stalk spouting a thick green ichor that stank like the bowels of death itself.

If the mutie was able to wriggle itself more than halfway through, its body tapered down to the forked tail and it would be unstoppably into the control room.

In that moment of truly terminal fear, Michael Brother’s training in Tao-Tain-Do came to his salvation. His right hand flowed to the butt of the gun, drew it, aimed it and fired it, all in less than a second.

And missed.

The small revolver, at point-blank range, kicked upward and surprised him, the .38-caliber round hitting the descending vanadium-steel doors a hand’s span above the thing’s head, doing it no harm whatsoever.

But the thunderous noise, in the confined space, made it pause in its determined attempt to get at its prey, pause for only a splintered segment of time, barely even measurable.

But long enough.

As Michael watched, holding the warm blaster, he saw the thing pinned to the concrete floor by the doors, flattened by it, gripped just behind the elongated skull, so that it could move neither backward nor forward.

The hissing stopped and it began to howl with a sickeningly human cry, like a hungry baby. All of its eyes waved like the tentacles of a sea anemone in its death agonies and then burst, one by one, soaking the ruff of pale fur around its crushed throat.

“Die, you forsaken mess of blasphemous shit!” Michael was trembling so much that he could hardly slide the gun back into its holster.