Chapter 17: Sanitarium
The sanitarium wards consisted of security offices, labs, gloomy corridors and cells. The walls were green and sterile, with hundreds of silvery doors opening into the rooms of the 'patients'. Some of the doors had been ripped off their hinges, while others were locked and bolted shut, with miserable screeches coming from the other side. Even the smoky, stale air conveyed an atmosphere void of hope.
Kurtis Trent stealthily made his way through the corridor. A mangled Agency soldier lay on the other side of the doorway at the end, oozing blood over the black-and-white chequered floor. But he was still alive. He stared at Kurtis through his gasmask, mumbling two last words: "Help … me …"
A grey, inhuman arm shot out from behind the doorway and drove its long claws into the soldier's abdomen. The commando yelped in agony and struggled to crawl away, but something – a creature behind the doorway, just outside of Kurtis' range of vision – dragged him away, across the corridor. Kurtis ran up to the doorway with his Boran X at the ready, but the soldier was nowhere to be seen. A trail of blood led across the floor and up the wall, disappearing into the narrow opening of a vent duct.
Kurtis lowered his pistol and glared at the blood-smeared vent opening. "And I thought this would be one of my easy days …"
As if on cue, a cell door burst open, and a patient ran clumsily down the hallway towards Kurtis. The patient wore a tight, grey uniform, which left everything to the imagination. A white muzzle covered his or her face. Long, grey strips of a rubber-like material hung from its bony hands and dragged on the floor. Its travesty of a voice only uttered a furious snarl, as it leapt at Kurtis and lashed out at him.
Kurtis instinctively aimed his Boran X and fired twice at the patient's head. It collapsed on the grimy floor. It might once have been an ordinary human being, but through her experiments, Boaz had transformed it into this killing machine. Kurtis shuddered and wandered on down the hallway.
More mutilated Agency guards lay on the floor, while most of their entrails were splattered over the walls and ceiling. "This looks bad. Real bad." Kurtis wondered if the escaped patients were the culprits. "No, that's impossible. Something far more powerful did this. Probably the same creature that dragged that soldier into the duct."
He noticed an open cell door to his right and peeked into the room. A patient sat on the filthy cot, which also happened to be the only furniture inside. The man wore the restrictive uniform as well, but his head was free of the muzzle. All hair had been shaved off, and his face was bruised and enervated. The few teeth he had left were nothing more than rotten, dark yellow fragments. His eyes stared emptily at the floor.
Kurtis walked up to the patient and tried to start a conversation. "What's going on down here?"
"Dying! We're all dying!" the patient whimpered, his voice hoarse and pervaded by a Turkish accent. "Proto's on the loose. Black Angel's gonna kill us!"
"Get a grip. What's gonna kill us?" Kurtis said, deducing that this 'Black Angel' might be the culprit of the bloodbath in the hallway.
"The Proto!" the patient repeated. "It got free. We got fed to it, but it ate the guards when the power shut down."
"What the hell's the Proto?"
"The screamer! The Black Angel!"
Kurtis realized that the patient was too horrified to explain what the 'Proto' actually was. "I don't give a damn about your Black Angel. What are you doing down here?"
"I didn't sign on for this, not devils and shadows." The patient shuddered. "I'm just a truck driver."
"What? You drove here?"
"Four days on the road, from Turkey. Long way, long way …"
"What did you bring here?" Kurtis already knew the answer, but he wanted to have his suspicion confirmed before he could believe the disturbing news. "What – were – you - carrying?"
"Death inside five tons of Turkish stone. The Sleeper."
Kurtis felt the cold fingers of dread gripping his skull. The stakes had just been raised. The Cubiculum Nephili was here, with Eckhardt and the Cabal. And he was the only one around to stop them.
"Drove here," the patient continued, "then they grabbed us. She locked us in here with her hungry pet, the screamer, the Proto!"
"You were fed to that thing?"
"Fed to it, yes. But not me." The patient shook his head vehemently. "No, not me, I'm safe in here …"
"Yeah, sure. Keep the door locked, okay?" Kurtis started walking out to the corridor.
"You can't hide out there," the patient yelled after him. "He'll get you! He'll get us all!"
Kurtis tried to shrug off the half-insane man's words, but they kept haunting his thoughts as he walked down the corridor. He soon reached a wall of iron grating, blocking his path. The door in the middle of the grating was locked, and he had to press a five-digit code in the keypad to proceed. "My farsee ability will help here." Kurtis raised his arms and held his palms out between the bars. Clenching his eyes shut, he let his mind and senses stream through his fingertips to the corridor on the other side.
Out.
Dark green walls. Smoke and dust in the air. Another one of Boaz' patients on the loose. Screams. Muffled weeping. More cells. A guard's corpse. Arm ripped off. Snarling voices.
Ignore them. Find the door code.
An office to my left. See through the window. Papers on the control panel.
Through the door.
A post-it on the table. Numbers scribbled across it.
Remember them.
06289 06289 06289
Good. Back. Up the hallway. Through the grating.
Kurtis felt his sight return to his body like a flash of lightning into his skull. He groaned and reeled backwards, a migraine throbbing behind his forehead. But as usual, the headache wore off as quickly as it had come. He stood motionless for a few seconds, catching his breath as if he'd just broken through the water surface after a long dive. Farsee trips always exhausted him.
He pressed '06289' on the keypad and stepped through the door.
Lara sat on the cold floor, leaned against the vinyl-like wall of the airlock. She held the Periapt shard up and ran her eyes over its crystalline surface. It was just as mysterious as its owner. What was that man doing in the Strahov? Was he on Eckhardt's side?
"No. If he did work for the Cabal, he'd have killed me without a second's thought. Besides, he wasn't wearing the Agency's uniform, and his weapons were different."
'Periapt Telum' was written on the shard's blunt-looking blade. Lara recalled that Telum was the Latin word for 'spear', 'weapon' or even 'beam of light'. "The Periapt shards … Didn't Werner mention something like that in his notes?" Lara pulled out the notebook and soon found the information she wanted: 'Lux Veritatis – 'Light of Truth'. A 12th century order of monks who hid the Obscura paintings. Said to posses the three Periapt artifacts - crystalline shards shaped like spearheads.'
"So that guy's a Lux Veritatis warrior. Well, then at least he can't be on Eckhardt's side."
Several storeys beneath the airlocks, Kurtis was sprinting through a hallway in a maximum containment area below the Sanitarium. His footsteps reverberated through the corridor, but other, faster footsteps followed behind him. They were the footsteps of a lithe animal, the footsteps of a carnivorous creature chasing its prey whilst growing ever more hungry.
Kurtis reached the end of the hallway and rushed down a metal stairway. He burst through a wide doorway to his right and into the huge hall with the main power lever. But before he could turn the Strahov's grid back on, he would have to get rid of the Proto-Nephilim stalking him.
Kurtis reached out his right fist and clutched the thin air, moving his arm as if pulling something down. The gate in front of him simultaneously descended from the ceiling. In the room outside, the Proto leapt down the stairway and landed a few metres from the doorway, but the gate slammed to the floor before the creature could reach its prey.
While the Proto roared with exasperation, Kurtis let out a sigh of relief. That relief was short-lived, however. A cacophony of clanking footsteps came from above, and Kurtis glared up at the source of the noise.
Ventilation ducts.
"Oh fuck." Kurtis followed the hidden creature with wide, unblinking eyes. It crawled up the shafts with the ease and agility of a spider, following the maze of ducts behind the walls, until the noises stopped at a vent opening just below the ceiling. For a brief moment, complete silence reigned the hall.
The Proto shattered that silence with a wrathful roar as it leapt out from the opening, diving through the smoky air, landing on the floor before Kurtis.
The creature's body resembled a cross between a wild boar and a wolf, lacking fur, but rippling its grotesque muscles. Its skin was dark grey, but some parts had peeled off to reveal the crimson flesh underneath. Two serpent-like fangs protruded from its jaws, and its narrow eyes glowed a bright shade of yellow. Numerous white horns, reminiscent of an elephant or a rhinoceros, jutted up from its back. It was clearly half Nephilim. Kurtis would have to defeat it with a single Periapt shard – Lara had taken his other one.
Kurtis instantly aimed his Boran X and kept squeezing the trigger as rapidly as possible. Bullets plunged into the Proto's hideous flesh, but the animal just scrambled towards Kurtis, completely unabated. The man jumped backwards and sailed through the air while emptying the Boran's clip into the monster. He soon bumped into the stone wall and fell to the floor, cornered. The Proto jumped at him, raising its claws to slash his throat, screaming in triumph …
… but Kurtis raised his leg, thrusting his booted foot out, delivering a powerful kick to the Proto's chest. The creature's scream of triumph turned into a roar of pain. It flew back across the hall, ramming into a few pipes at the far wall. The metal surfaces cracked, and white steam came hissing out.
Kurtis scrambled to his feet and slapped a new clip into the Boran X. The Proto was already sprinting towards him again, but he took good aim this time and fired a single bullet into the creature's right eye. The yellow slit burst, blood squirting from the remaining wound. The Proto screeched and collapsed.
Kurtis pulled out his Periapt shard, raised it over his head and drove it into the creature's torso in one swift movement. The blade cut through the tainted flesh like a hot knife through butter. Bizarre entrails splattered onto the floor. Blood sprayed up, drenching the white and dark blue sleeves of Kurtis' shirts. The Proto let out one last scream, then rested silently in the hot pool of blood flowing from its stomach.
Kurtis slowly stepped back from the Proto-Nephilim's corpse and tucked the shard back into a small pocket in his shoulder holster. For a few seconds, he let his eyes close and stood motionless, enjoying the silence.
Then, he walked across the hall and pulled the lever for the main power.
In the surveillance office, Karel, Eckhardt and Muller had watched the fight between Kurtis Trent and the Proto-Nephilim on the security monitors. "Well, it seems the male intruder isn't completely useless," Muller commented. "It only took him a few minutes to get rid of this problem, which Boaz did not dare to confront for many years."
"And he even turned the power back on," Karel added. "How helpful."
Eckhardt remained silent. He stared at the Periapt shard in Trent's holster and the other one in Croft's hand.
Karel was contemplating Miss Croft. The farther she had ventured into the Strahov, the more fascinated he had felt by her courage and determination. So far, she had displayed remarkable strength – both physically and mentally. Karel had never seen such strength in any other woman, not even Dr. Kristina Boaz. If one could somehow make Croft realize how pointless her quest to stop the Cabal really was, she could become a brilliant ally.
In his calm mind, Karel was already choosing which words he would use to convince her.
The moment Lara heard the footsteps coming down the hallway outside, she scrambled to her feet and started climbing the wall. After a few quick, acrobatic moves, she had perched herself under the ceiling, gazing at the floor three metres below.
The doors hissed aside, and the familiar brown-haired man entered the airlock, pistol at the ready. Lara dropped down behind him. He instantly spun around, but Lara kicked the Boran X out of his hand and trained her own Rigg 09 on his forehead.
Kurtis closed his eyes, realizing that his life would inevitably end now.
Lara pulled the trigger.
The bullet pierced the frontal lobe and plunged into the brain, effortlessly snuffing out the victim's life. He let out an agonized groan and fell to the cold floor.
Kurtis opened his eyes. He had felt the bullet whistle past his head. Lara still stood in front of him, aiming her pistol at something to his left. Confused, Kurtis turned around in time to see one of Boaz' mutant 'patients' landing on the steel floor. Blood trickled out from the hole in his muzzle. If Lara hadn't shot him, he would have assaulted Kurtis with the animal claws protruding from his human hands.
Kurtis looked back at the woman, astonished. He had expected to die there and then, but instead, Lara had saved his life.
"Thanks."
A/N: Stay tuned for the story of how Kurtis got knocked out before the fight against Boaz …
