The bats wheeled about over the companions, confused and angry, unable to comprehend what was happening. Then they noticed the sec men who were continuing to fire their blasters, all the while shouting and cursing over the engines of the Hummers. Attracted by the noise and lights, the bats poured along the tunnel in a river of wings.
“Shitfire!” Mitchum cursed, covering his head as the bats arrived. “Shoot these freaking things!”
The .50 cals fanned death down the tunnel, dozens of riddled corpses fell to the tracks, but the night flyers swarmed over the warm sec men, getting tangled in their hair and clothing. The warm hoods of the Hummers were coated with the creatures, the headlights blocked by the leathery wings. Darkness enveloped the Hummers.
“Launch some Birds!” Mitchum ordered, crushing a wiggling bat in his bare hand.
“We can’t!” a sec man cried, slapping the bats aside with his blaster. “They’ll only hit the bats and detonate yards away. Mebbe right in the pod!”
“Then gut them!” the colonel snarled, drawing a machete and slashing the winged rodents apart.
Knives were used to hack the animals off, but the smell of blood only excited them more and a feeding frenzy began. The tiny fangs first ripping open the flesh of their own dead, then the humans were next and the screaming really began.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Now’s our chance,” Ryan said, standing from the puddle and starting down the tunnel.
Muddy and wet, the companions quietly hurried away from the broiling firefight between the sec men and bats. The high beams were only a flickering glow blocked by the multitude of angry bats. They couldn’t see Mitchum any more than he could them. How long the condition would last was another matter entirely, so they moved fast.
“Over here!” Krysty shouted in the gloom.
Following the sound of her voice, Ryan found her and his son standing before a plain steel door set into the tiled wall. A burnished plate listed it as Access 9 Sewer Pumps. The companions gathered close as J.B. picked the lock in the dark and pulled the door open.
Inside was a small antechamber, closed off by the standard black metal entrance to a redoubt. The alloy was smooth and unmarred, without handle, hinges or keyholes. Just smooth steel. Searching along the sides, Ryan found a small steel plate set into the wall and eased it aside to find an armored keypad. Quickly, the man tapped in the entry code.
As the nuke-proof portal slid ponderously aside, the companions rushed forward, only to stop as a strong smell of ozone filled the antechamber.
“Fireblast!” Ryan cried out, shoving the others backward from the door.
Then the first wisps of crackling white fog flowed into view. A wafting tendril touched the barrel of Jak’s M-16, dissolving the predark steel, leaving only a hollow nubbin sticking out from the frame.
“Fuck!” Jak cried, throwing the useless blaster at the fog. The rapidfire went into the mist and vanished.
Retreating into the tunnel, the companions could only watch as a swollen expanse of gray-white fog flowed out of the redoubt. There was no true surface, but its bulk was impenetrable, forever moving and alive with countless tendrils of mist. Heaving as if taking deep breaths, an eerie glow emanated from its core, casting the tunnel into ghostly blue shadows.
Half of the companions had never seen such a thing before, but they clearly remembered the horror stories told by Ryan, Krysty, J.B. and Doc about the incredible monstrosity, the ultimate guardian of the redoubts. Sometimes the underground bases were patrolled by sec hunter droids or comp-operated weapons systems for protection from invaders. But only an occasional redoubt had ever had this hellish bastard of science and insanity.
The companions fell back before the fog, and it pulsed from the redoubt, expanding and swelling in size to fill the tunnel. A bat on the ceiling screamed at the sight of the thing, and tried to fly past the glowing fog. A tendril of mist caressed the animal in flight, and it was gone, only the bloody tip of a wing tumbling down to splash into a puddle between the railroad tracks.