CHAPTER NINE
Carlos Murray, former head physician of the Mercy Hospital of Philadelphia stepped out onto the evacuated street just beyond the building's doors. The afternoon sun shone brightly. The weather was excessively hot for the first weekend in July, but it did not compare to the heat he felt from the people he greeted just a block down from the entrance to the emergency room.
He stared at the building for a moment, surprised, in fact that he was seeing it again. Somehow, the hospital he stared at no longer seemed to be the same place he had dedicated the last twenty years of his life to. That building was a bustling, often chaotic place that required almost limitless attention, but brought with it many rewards.
The building he stared at now was dark and ominous, empty and foreboding. A flash of something horrible, twisted, black, with saliva dripping from a set of metallic looking teeth crawling out of the very pits of Hell flickered in his mind.
When the place was evacuated just a few days ago, after several police officers and an unknown number of hospital employees had disappeared into the black depths of the empty train tunnels below the building by the horrible black reincarnation of the devil itself, it was then that Murray was hustled away by the military, who had taken a vested interested in this situation.
He was given no details from those who took him, but he was asked for every bit of information he knew. As a living witness, they apparently had figured he knew much more than he actually offered.
Murray unfortunately could only tell them what he knew, which was very little. When he was brought back to the place after nearly two hundred well armed officers had disappeared on Saturday night, he felt chills run through his spine.
"Dr. Murray?" A uniformed man approached him. "Follow me, please."
The man did not introduce himself, but Carlos saw the man's name on his fatigues. L. Sans. He followed the officer down the street to a small tent that had been propped up in the middle of the street and shook hands with the man inside.
"Here's our situation, we're hoping you could help." The man started. "During the overnight, we sent squadrons of soldiers to investigate the possibility that these …things… have created some kind of a hive below the hospital. We lost one squadron below ground, and the entire topside base as well. Every single person was gone. One hundred eighty in total."
Murray swallowed, glanced around, but said nothing. He was not sure why he was here. Though he had been questioned over the last four and half days for his medical knowledge about the victims of the parasitic creature and remained in military 'protection' during that time, he was not informed of where he was headed for when he was loaded into a sedan that morning.
"We are organizing a better armed team to head back down there. They have two orders. One, bring back any and all living souls they can find. Two, blast these goddamned things off the map."
Murray nodded. It sounded like a reasonable plan.
"Now, you are here doctor, for your previous experience with these things."
"What do you mean?"
"We have a full medical facility set up back there," he pointed with his thumb behind his shoulder, indicating that the tents behind the small one the two men stood in were make shift medical centers. "From what we have gathered about these creatures' life cycle, and from your experiences with them, we want to team medical knowledge together."
"I'm afraid I don't understand," Murray said shaking his hand. "I don't know anything about these things. I've only..."
"You've only seen nearly every stage of the life cycle of these monsters. You know more than I do, Sir, right now."
Murray looked at the officer in wide eyed wonder. "What?"
"They start as eggs; that much we all know. The crablike things, which I believe you are acquainted with already," he said and Murray nodded, "are the spawn of those eggs. These are the stage two development of the parasites. They then implant their host victim with the stage three, the worm like larvae that emerges from the host's chest."
Murray nodded. "Yes, yes...they impregnate their host. And at gestation," he shut his eyes, "roughly twelve hours after...impregnation, the embryo within reaches full gestation and emerges from the host body, killing the host."
The General filled in the rest.
"We believe that the creature is sort of like...like a caterpillar... it undergoes morphosis. We have visual verification that the hatchling sheds its skin several times, and that with in an unbelievably small amount of time it reaches the final, adult stage."
"How short of a time?" Murray asked inquisitively.
"Based on past experience with the creatures, two hours. These things grow quick and are fatal from the start."
"So again, what can I do to help? All of the victims I had with these...face huggers... on their heads, they all died upon maturity of the embryo within. They burst through the chest, literally exploding the chest cavity, the heart, the lungs, everything. I cannot help you. I don't have the answer you are looking for."
"We are sending our troops below to eradicate any bugs they find,"
"Bugs?" Murray questioned.
"Bugs." The officer stated, nodding. "And bring back any parasitized men they can. We want you, along with our medical team to surgically remove the embryo."
Murray contemplated this for a moment. It was almost a feasible idea, in retrospect, had he known what would happen to his original victims, he probably would have tried that very thing. Now, however, he took time to contemplate the officer's proposal.
"Any problem with that?" The impatient man questioned after a long pause.
"Well, quite frankly, yes. I have no idea at all if what you want is possible. I mean, the...the...face hugger things, I tried to surgically remove that and the damned thing dripped acid from the cut I made. It burned clean through my scalpel, through the table, through the floor and the next floor and the next floor and the next floor, it went all the way down to the air ducts in the basement. If this embryo lives like a parasite off the human host, odds are they'll die anyway. If I go in and try to cut it off, it would risk spilling acid into the person's chest! Either way they'll die."
"Which means you have nothing to lose."
He quieted down and stared blankly at the man in front of him.
"If it is a known fact that impregnated victim will die with no medical attention, then trying to remove the things will risk nothing. If they die, they were going to anyway. But we are holding out that perhaps a way can be found to save impregnated victims. Doctor, understand this now... if these things continue to propagate, and kill, we humans will become the minority on this planet."
"Well," Murray took a deep sigh as he stared out into the open street at the troops that were forming up. "What about all the animals?"
"Excuse me?"
"These things are breeding in animals too," Murray added in with a 'don't you realize' sort of look and tone. "Anything big enough that they can get ahold of, they will reproduce inside. Something needs to be done about that. But I will try to remove the embryo if your men bring me someone back alive."
Murray shook hands with the military officer and stepped out of the tent. He watched the troops quietly organizing for a moment, then walked down the street to where the carcass lay of the animal that was killed in the street earlier this morning.
"Hi again," he said warily to the private who has escorted him. "Who shot this thing?"
"Don't know," Sans said. "Was dead up here when he got topside, everyone else was gone."
"Oh, I see. Does it have acid for blood, too?"
Sans looked the doctor dead in the eye and nodded. "One guy got his hand dissolved just from touching it. He's missing two fingers and most of his palm now."
Murray nodded.
"Who are you?"
"Carlos Murray. Head...well, I used to be head of the Mercy Hospital," he indicated to the building behind him.
"Name's Sans, Private Lewis Sans."
They shook hands.
"Where were you during all this?" Murray asked.
"Down below. We're going back down in a little while."
"Yes, I heard."
The two men stared at the tattered corpse on the ground.
"Ugly things aren't they?" Sans said in a quiet whisper as he shuffled his rifle around in his hands.
"Yea. They are."
"First time seeing one?" He asked the doctor, noting his increasingly paling face.
"No, I saw two of them. Tuesday, when they took..." Murray fell silent and stared at the thing on the ground, trying to make sense of its twisted black body.
"You?"
Sans nodded his head. "Seen one back at my base, in Virginia. They killed a lot of people that night."
Murray looked at the young officer and tried to put on as certain of a face as he could. "I am going to try to find a way to save the victims."
Sans nodded, "I hope you do."
"Bring me someone back," Murray said. "And son, bring yourself back."
Sans smiled gratefully for the consideration.
"I'll try."
"Who's that?" Murray asked, pointing to a pair of men peering around a building.
"Damn it! Reporters!" Sans trotted over to the man with the small camera in his hand. "Excuse me, you can't be here!"
The other man leapt from around the corner of the building, bombarding Sans with questions. He ignored the reporter and fought with the camera man who was pressing closer to the corpse of the black animal on the street. More men were coming over quickly to remove the two trespassers.
Sans forcibly ripped the camera from the hand of the camera man and military police took both men into custody. The general that had been sent to replace the last one took the camera from Sans immediately and disappeared with it into the back of one of the vehicles.
Sans walked back over to Murray, who watched the whole scene with a clenched jaw.
"This is losing control." Sans whispered to him. "Do you think we're gonna win this?"
Murray raised his eyebrows, "Win? I don't think this is a war. It's an…..infestation. These are animals. What do you think?"
"I don't know what I think. I tell ya what I don't think anymore."
"What's that?"
Sans thought back to the radar blip the night these eggs showed up.
"I don't think they're here by chance."
"Why's that?" Murray asked, curiosity piqued.
"This isn't random. The affected areas," Lewis said in a whisper, carefully eyeballing his surroundings to make sure no one was nearby before he continued. "…they aren't just random. There's a.. a pattern, almost a straight line. Like they were dropped from …." He paused.
He had studied the dispersal area, just had others. He knew what he was saying, though it might sound crazy, had an undeniable validity, but he still did not know, or could not fathom or accept, how the animals truly did arrive.
He continued on after a pause to try to form appropriate words.
"Dropped from?" Murray asked, pressing Sans for his thoughts.
"An airplane." Sans said simply, dropping his hands down towards his waist, in a fashion that indicated maybe he did not exactly believe it was an airplane that was responsible.
"Uhh.." Murray stammered. "What?"
"Little known fact is that most of the bases around the country monitored a weird radar blip in the middle of the night, the same night these things...these eggs showed up. They weren't just laid by one of the adults, they were delivered here."
Murray nodded, "Yea, I've heard that. Terrorists, right?"
"No..." Sans said deeply. "No way terrorists could do this," he added with a more certain tone. "I've never seen anything like it. Never."
"So what are you saying, Lewis?"
Sans fell quiet. A glaring voice over a megaphone called the troops together.
"It's time."
"Good luck." Murray said before Lewis trotted off.
They shook hands.
Murray watched a full force of officers gather in the streets. Just over two hundred eager men waited their chance to shoot the alien animals into oblivion. The group quietly listened to their orders.
"We believe that the creatures may be residing in the deeper tunnels to the east of the building. This is where the previous team in those tunnels reported seeing a large group of the animals."
Sans listened quietly to the General's unprovocative way of saying that in those tunnels, the Beta team from earlier in the morning had been completely wiped out by a swarm of nearly nine foot tall acid blood, razor toothed, barbed tailed monsters.
"You will enter the tunnels through a series of manholes. Bring back any victims alive that you can find, and kill any of these bugs that you encounter."
He waited a moment before saying, "Go people!"
The team moved out in unison and found their entrance just about a block down from their gathering point in the street. When Sans' turn came up to enter the man hole, he took a deep breath.
"Here we go again," he thought as he climbed down the ladder. "Once more into the dark."
Sans somehow felt slightly more confident about this adventure. He was not sure why exactly. Perhaps it was just the enthusiasm of the men as they took to the tunnels that brought his confidence up, or it was because of how well armed the massive invading force was.
Sans did find some relief in that all of the men who took to the darkness below the ground knew what they were going to face in the tunnels, at least that is to say they had all seen the carcass, and they knew the animals could be killed.
Perhaps that was the thing that built his confidence the most. When he saw the creature in front of him in Virginia, he watched men empty their rounds on it and the thing never stopped. He thought that the animal's impossibly hard black hide was actually bulletproof.
Seeing the thing dead in the street above helped confirm to him that it just took more bullets than he thought to kill one.
The massive group of men that proceeded quietly deeper into the old train tunnels were armed with plenty of ammunition, flamethrowers and grenades. Each and every one of them felt that they had what it would take to destroy the nasty bugs.
Sans hoped they could find survivors and that the doctor he had met could actually help them, though it was hard to imagine. He briefly wondered if, perhaps, if Murray did find a way to save the victims, he could go back to the Virginia woods and find Melinda and help her, too.
He shrugged those foolish thoughts out his head. Sans had already seen how quickly people die from the parasites. It had been nearly a full week since Coolbaugh had disappeared into the woods that night. He knew she was dead. He focused instead on making sure that he remained alive.
The men scoured the tunnels, slowly. Minutes ticked to an hour, then two. Every so often the leader would call in a whisper to the men behind him requesting directions, and sometimes asking for the amount of time they had spent in the cavelike tunnels. The men slowed their already slow pace to a dead stop.
"Are you sure this right?" Lewis could hear someone in the lead say.
A whispering voice responded. Lewis could see a pair of shaky hands holding a GPS unit while another person eyed a map. "Yea, there's no other tunnel."
"This sure as hell doesn't look right." Someone said.
"Who did this?" Another whispering voice spoke out.
"You mean what." Another person called out.
"Quiet!" voices continued to echoed.
Lewis barely noticed until someone else pointed it out, then his eyes scanned the walls. The concrete was gone. It was replaced, or covered, with a hardened shell with a pattern that resembled some kind of ribbing. Sans sighed deeply as the men slowly crept through the tunnels. Eerie repeats of the events from earlier this morning played through his mind.
Suddenly the group came to a halt again.
"Do you hear that?" The commander in the front of the group asked quietly.
Sans strained his ears to hear anything at all. He thought he could hear water dripping to his right. Many of the men seemed to hear it and flashlights started to turn in the direction. The group crept forward slightly and slowly a hole, big enough for a crouched man to easily slip through could be seen in the wall.
Water run off from the dampness of the slimy ceiling was dripping down the sides of the tunnel, trickling slowly on the ground below the break in the wall.
A sea of flashlights now focused on it as the leader of the pack crouched down, blocking the remaining group from viewing through the hole until he crept through. One by one the men quietly started to file through the hole behind him. Sans was the twelfth person through the gap. He stopped amongst the others and stared in quiet silence and fearful awe of the chamber around him.
The space beyond the hole was wide and long. The tall curved ceiling gave the place a cathedral look to it, but the dark room was more appropriately a tomb. It looked like a sadistic shrine to the dead. The floor was covered with rows of perfectly lined up egg cases, all long hatched.
Sans stepped forward, following after several officers who spread out and investigated. He moved carefully through the hatched eggshells and stepped over a slimy set of old train tracks that was exposed through the lines of eggs. He frowned and looked side to side.
Glancing down again, he reassured himself that he was indeed inside a train tunnel, but the place had no entrance or exit, no way for any old train to pass through the chamber. They were surrounded by walls all around. The only way in or out was through the hole in the wall.
Sans pulled himself together and stared at the walls, if one could call them that. The walls of the chamber were covered in a thick hard white substance, sporadically strewn over the shell-like ribbing. The whole room almost looked it was covered in massive, man-sized spider webs.
As he walked forward and shined his light ahead, his eyes grew wide with horror. Bodies were, strung up on the wall, buried behind the thick white resin secretions. The faces were contorted with pain and fear, old dried blood stained the walls and the floor, the chests of each one burst clean open from the inside.
From behind him he could hear horrified gasps of men entering the room, and he was sure he heard more than one person vomit. The smell of decay and sulfur that permeated every pore on each man's body was awful and nauseating.
Sans could not pull his eyes away from the ghastly sight no matter how much he tried. He wiped sweat from his brow and it burned his eyes. He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed them hard, and hoped maybe when he opened them again, he would find it was all just one big nightmare that he had woken up from, safe in his barracks.
No such luck he thought as he scanned side to side, looking at the walls all around. He turned around watched the men that continued to crawl through the hole.
He felt his hand start to shake he realized that each and every man that was entering the tunnel had crawled underneath the feet of a strung up corpses. He noticed that the dripping sounds the group had heard was most definitely not caused by water. His flashlight panned down a running stream of blood, and he only then became aware of the scent of urine filling the chamber as well.
Everywhere the men looked, there were bodies. The tunnel was filled with decaying, rotting, tortured corpses. Hundreds upon hundreds of bodies were strung up to the walls, many piled on top of the corpse underneath it. Men, women, children, even a few paws stuck out of the webbing on the walls. The animals were indiscriminate killers.
Sans panned the walls, too horrified to even turn away as he took in the details of what he could see. His eyes registered shiny shoes and business suits, bare feet and torn pantyhose, ripped jeans, gold watches. He saw uniformed men, doctors, nurses, no doubt Murray's missing staff from the hospital so far above their heads.
Each and every one of the tortured souls strung to the walls lifeless and silent was grotesque, mutilated, a final look of sheer agony and fear etched forever into their faces. It was unlike anything Sans had ever imagined. Even the hardest of soldiers in the room began to turn sickly white and shake with fear.
The floor of the massive cavern was littered along the walls with the dead corpses of the face hugger hatchlings from the eggs. Sans scanned across the eggs again just to be sure that they were all indeed hatched.
"Jesus Christ, what is this?" One of the horrified men whispered.
"It's their hive," Sans, nearby answered in a morbid whisper.
"Where's the rest of them?" Someone asked quietly.
"What?" another responded as though mortified at the thought that there could possibly be more people adhered to the walls.
"He's right," Sans whispered out as loudly as he could. "These are all dead, every one of them. But there were so many more taken this morning, they can't all be dead yet." He turned to face the leader of the group. "They would still have these things on their faces."
"How do you know that?" The commander questioned with great authority, as if offended that a simple private could know more than he did.
"It takes them twelve … or I don't know… fifteen or something… hours…to do their…their thing. Our people disappeared at four in the morning. I don't see any fatigues here."
The commander checked his watch. "Well, it's nearly nineteen hundred hours."
"That means we're almost out of time to find any survivors." Sans said with urgency.
"If they're not all dead already," another officer piped in, with a definite 'there's no way we are really going to look for them' tone.
"We should get out of here, or we'll end up strung up on the walls, too." Someone, clearly breaking down, shouted.
"No," the group's leader barked. "We can do this."
"No way," a frightened officer with a squeaky voice cracked. "Not gonna happen. We can't get out of here carrying bodies with us!"
"No," Sans said, "Then they wake up."
"What?" The squeaky man said.
Sans glanced around miserably to the corpses along the walls. "They're awake and aware when they die."
"Christ." Someone in the room whispered in shock.
"How the hell do you know all this Private?" The defensive commander asked.
Sans looked him square in the eye. "I've seen it before."
"Alright people," the commander said firmly. "Let's get out of here, there's nothing we can do here. We need to find the others, if we can. Maybe there's another chamber like this."
"Just what I want to see, another room like this." One officer muttered as he headed out with the rest.
"Hey, Marcus, how many people do you think are in here?" someone asked.
Sans watched as a thin, beady nosed barely out of his teens officer glanced around the room. His flashlight and head nodded together in perfect harmony over the rows and rows of eggs in the deep chamber, then he quickly turned and started walking away.
"Well," he said as he walked, carefully stepping through the columns of hatched eggs. "Assuming it is one egg per person and this room was filled to the max with both, there's about four hundred eggs here by quick count."
"Which means that there's four hundred of those big things running around?" A terrified officer deduced.
"Yeah," Marcus responded calmly, "Guess so."
"Oh shit, we are so outnumbered." Another shaky voice echoed up.
"So where are they all?"
"There must be more chambers." Sans responded.
"We have to get out of here, we're all gonna die!"
"Quiet!" Someone from the front snapped before disappeared through the hole. "That's enough! Keep it together, people!"
With no more words each of the men filed back out into the adjacent vacant train tunnel and the large group of infantry started on their quest deeper into the tunnels to find anyone or anything alive. They walked quietly, each man running with their adrenaline and nerves on high, scanning the walls around them. Sans watched the flashlights around him flicker through the walls and bounce off the ceiling.
"Look at the ceiling," he said very quietly to the officer next to him.
Both men glanced up; as did several more who overheard Sans speak. The ceiling looked almost wet. It was blacker than anything else in the dark pit so far below the ground. Bits of thick secretions dangled like saliva from the jaws of a rabid dog, and glistened in the bobbing flashlights.
"It's so slimy," one of the men whispered.
The group halted again without warning and every fear that each man had within their hearts emerged as they stared ahead a Y junction in the train tunnel in front of them. The walls of the tunnel were lined with parasitized victims, mostly all wearing military fatigues. The floor in front of the massive search party was carefully lined with eggs casings for as far as the men could see in their flashlight beams.
Horrified into nothing more than a dead silence with a few panic-suppressing gasps, the men strode slightly forward. Sans could not stop the sound of his own heart beating loudly. It pounded so hard in his chest it was making his ears ring. Many soldiers, frightened beyond imagination by the sight in front of them refused to move. Sans put together what effort he could muster to walk forward. He stared, gaping, at the walls that lined the train tunnel.
"Oh God, we need to get out of here," Someone from the ranks said.
"Are any of them alive?" Another asked.
"They're all alive, all of them." Sans responded clearly, his voice echoing through the chamber.
One of the men behind him screamed and fell backward, hitting Sans.
"Jesus! He moved!"
The group faced one of the men on the wall. His hands and feet and face were the only thing exposed under the thick resiny bindings that held him to the wall. His fingers and head were moving and a slight gurgling noise was filing through the air.
While some officers scanned further down the endless tunnel, several people, including Sans attempted to break the moving man loose from his bindings. The thick white cocoon took all the force a team could muster, but it did snap off. The material was almost like plastic with a slimy covering, but with enough muscle and force it broke like peanut brittle and in a few seconds, the group pulled the parasitized young officer off the wall.
Together, the men tried to pull the spidery animal from the officer's face. They tried first the tail, which only tightened down harder, choking the man below it. They tried to pry the creature's long spidery legs loose form the man's skull, which only prompted the animal to dig deeper into the man's head until blood was drawn from his scalp.
Together, a team effort was enforced with every portion of the creature's body and tail being pulled on at the same time, but the thing would not budge.
"Something's moving down there!" A voice from several dozen meters along the egg field called out.
Everyone stopped moving, breathing, and all eyes and lights shined down the corridor. While the one light of the caller was not enough to light so far back into the long tunnel, the brightness of the whole team's lights lit the chamber like night had become day.
Sans suddenly lost his confidence, he wondered in fact, if what he felt really was any confidence at all. His eyes followed a sickly trail of parasitized people all along the walls, eggs on the ground below them, and a slimy black ceiling covering their heads.
The tunnel curved to the right far ahead of them, and just beyond that turn, in the form of shadows on the bodies cocooned to the walls, something very large was indeed moving. A hiss arose from the tomb, filling the air with a cold shrill that turned every last man into pale, shaking reflections of terror.
After a moment, several officers in the front of the group started to carefully walk forward through the forest of eggs. They glanced at each other and readied their weapons and they pressed forth. Others from behind Sans started forward.
"No!" Sans called out to stop the advancing men in the tunnel ahead. "Wait!" He whispered to those next to him.
The men ahead turned and glanced back at Sans, who without thinking, was striding towards them.
"Those eggs there...ahead... they're still closed. They haven't hatched. They'll hatch if you get too close. You'll end up with one of your face, and we can't get them off!"
"Something's moving up there, it could be a person." One of the men said softly.
Sans eyes drifted to shadow bouncing off the wall. He truly felt that whatever the thing was that was moving, it was certainly no person.
"I don't thi..." he started.
A wild ear piercing shriek filled the cavern. Many men dropped their guns to cover their ears and they groaned in pain from hearing the sound like metal fingernails dragging harshly across a metal chalkboard.
The eggs in front of the group began to hatch, simultaneously. Dozens of eggs opened up like horrible slimy tulips; the horrible creatures within began to raise their legs out of their infantile nesting chamber.
"We need to get the hell out of here," an officer in the group called out loudly.
Sans couldn't agree more, but he wanted so much to convince the men that were striding boldly through the field of hatching eggs.
He started to shout out again, but fell silent as he watched with horror as one of the hatchlings simply leapt from its leathery encasing and in one quick move attached its thin legs to the head of the nearest officer, wrapped its long tail around his throat and sent the man flying backwards, slamming into the wall. Four men darted through the egg field, away from the rest of the group and further into the tunnel, blinded by terror and panic as they tried to outrun the crablike hatchlings.
Sans watched as they all stopped in their tracks around the turn, screamed wildly as the fierce shriek echoed again and each man began to fire their rifles without a moment's break.
Suddenly the tunnel filled with flames as another officer began to burn the whole egg field, the living parasitized men and women strung up in the corridor, and block off the only exit of the small group around the turn by filling it with fire. Shots rang out, people panicked, and suddenly chaos erupted.
"OH GOD!" Someone howled with spine tingling panic.
Sans spun around to see a pale white, shaking soldier staring straight upwards. The men all darted their eyes and lights upward. The black ceiling was moving.
Sans suddenly realized it was not a ceiling at all that they had been looking at. What they saw was the old train tunnel ceiling covered with the sleeping bodies of the horrible black serpents, full grown, ferocious, and merely waiting for the attack to begin.
Their horrific, twisted black bodies blended into their own hellishly spun hive walls creating the most perfect of camouflage. Like bats in a great swarm, the gigantic monsters released themselves from the tunnel ceilings and dove for the officers with tremendous ferocity and no hesitation. The creatures attacked with more precision than a machine programmed for perfect killing.
Panic broke loose as many men darted back down the tunnel while more opened fire, hitting their own teammates in the panic. The weapon fire was deafening, but not quite loud enough to drown out the shrieking hisses of the horde of dragons that attacked the men. Sans shouted for everyone to leave, but as he pulled back with a small group, he doubted anyone else could hear him over the gunfire.
He soon realized they were all surrounded. Sans darted back the way they had come, but the ceiling back towards the exit had sprung to life and another massive attack wing of the monstrous creatures piled through the tunnels, clamoring over one another to be the first to get the men that were firing upon them.
Sulfur smells and sizzling sounds soon filled the tunnels as the injured beasts bled their acid blood into the chamber. Smoke began to burn any living man's eyes red with the sting of acid and death. Lewis barely registered panicked, screaming, crying men dropped to their knees howling in unimaginable pain as the acidic blood seared into their chests, skulls and appendages.
A small group had managed to slip through a thin spot in the attacking horde, only barely avoiding acid burns, impalement by a spiny tail or terrible talon, and friendly fire.
Sans saw his opening and dodged through it, nearly coming face first into a burning carcass of a dead bug. He pulled himself to his feet and ran with the group.
"Throw a grenade! Bring the tunnel down on them!" Sans shouted.
One officer, abiding without question grabbed a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin and heaved the thing as far as he possibly could. Immediately, two more did the same, and the men turned to try to escape only to find a massive horde approaching. The men fired wildly into the black horde, sending burning acid splattering in all directions.
"NO!" Sans shouted loudly. "Control your fire! CONTROL YOUR FIRE!"
He barely spoke the words when the explosion from the three grenades rocked the tunnel and sent most of the men flying. The ceiling above them crumbled and the walls gave in. Officers, parasitized hosts strapped to the wall, and the bugs, were crushed under the concrete slabs.
Obeying Sans, the ever dwindling group of escaping officers kept their guns under control and fired shorter bursts at the swarm of black monsters.
The men shouted to each other and tried their best to help one another escape if one fell back, but if any were to survive, there was no time to play hero. Sans shouted to the men to run each time another officer fell back.
It may not have been a tactic he was proud of, but he no intentions of dying in the darkness below the city of Philadelphia. Running had worked for him in the past, and he was desperate to make it work for them again.
As the group of officers ran frantically back through the cold tunnels, the pursuing swarm of demons had not trouble keeping up. The tunnel was still collapsing in around them, and Sans shouted out for someone to lob another grenade.
Someone in the back of the small group grabbed a grenade and pulled the pin. Sans heard shouting and spun around, weapon at the ready. As if it happened in slow motion, Lewis registered the pin flying out of the grenade, glistening in his flashlight as he turned around. He saw the spiny tail of the alien animal pierce straight through the chest of the man holding the now live grenade, and in the flicker of a second, Sans noticed three more grenades strapped to the man's utility belt.
"RUN! RUN!" Sans shouted and in the fraction of a second it took for the remaining men to register what was going on, the explosion rocked the tunnels, sending bugs, concrete, shrapnel, and flames into the confined space, rocking the walls, and starting a total cave in.
Lewis coughed and gagged. He couldn't ear; his eyes registered nothing but smoke. His nose stung with the powerful scent of acid. The high pitched tone in his head ringed on long after he pulled himself to his feet.
His attention was drawn to the bouncing light of a flashlight in the dead-white palm of another man as he started towards Lewis, shaking violently, covered in dusty powder. Slowly the men lucky enough to be alive, climbed out of the rubble and made their way down the tunnel, towards the ladders up to the street.
Shaking, sick, and full of shock, the men climbed the ladder as quickly as they could while the rickety old thing threatened to pull loose from the weakened walls. Sans turned open a manhole cover and flung himself street side, coughing, gagging, and ultimately vomiting.
More men followed up behind him as he pulled himself slowly to his shaky feet. As the last man though the man hole turned back to help the officer behind him, screams and blood curdling shrieked filled the tunnel above and below.
"Oh my God," someone on the street wailed as the men heard the calls of the alien horde.
The officer at the top of the ladder had gotten one hand through and shrieked in agony as one of the black creatures gripped onto his thighs, stopping him from going forward. The thing pulled him down a few rungs and two other officers nearly leapt through the cover to try to grab him, while two more aimed their weapons to fire. Sans shouted for them to get back.
"Shut it! Shut it!"
Another of the massive creatures started climbing the ladder with incredible speed and agility and Sans slammed the manhole cover shut on the thing. He was certain the heavy steel cover had hit the animal in its long banana shaped head, but he was sure that it would not slow the creature down much.
The men bolted off down the vacant city street. As his head cleared, Sans could hear sirens blaring. As they approached their staging area, it was obvious the panic and chaos in the tunnels below had spilled over to the streets.
"What the hell is going up here?" Someone asked quickly.
They rounded a corner and saw hundreds of police officers and firemen working hard at clearing the buildings and streets through the area. The very ground below their feet seemed to shaking.
"Did you feel that?" Sans asked.
"I think we started an earthquake."
The men wasted no more time in getting back to the command base. The commander in charge did not seemed concerned about the massive loss of life they had sustained, or about the fact that there were more of those creatures below ground than the men could count.
He shouted at the troops for detonating grenades, which ignited a gas line and destroyed several city blocks, forcing further evacuation of the area.
Sans tuned most of it out. He no longer cared about the cover up crap, or the hard day the General was having with dealing with the President. It all seemed wasted to him, for he knew that when those monsters decided to come top side to hunt for more hosts, nothing would stand a chance. It seemed like no one truly understood the gravity of the situation.
Murray ran towards the injured men, but Sans, who did not notice, grabbed hold of the General's collar and screamed at him.
"Don't you realize there are hundreds… maybe thousands of those things under there! The whole team is gone, sir! GONE!"
Frantically, Sans shouted for a the city to be bombed, for every last of the animals to be destroyed.
"Nothing will be safe. Nothing will survive!" He wailed.
The creatures were waiting in the darkness, taking those that they could, snatching people away to use to breed, pulling them deeper into the tunnels creating a massive hive right under the feet of the very men that tried to stop them.
They bred and built their massive army until the time was right to attack in force and over take the surface of the planet. Sans slunk down on to the bumper of a vehicle, as the General dismissed himself from his grip, his mind drifting to thoughts of the end of the world as he knew it.
"Hey?" A voice said.
Lewis looked up and saw the concerned eyes of Murray watching him. "Let me look at those wounds."
"No, I'm fine." Lewis said immediately.
He barely realized he was cut and bleeding. His injuries seemed so trivial to him after everything that had just taken place. Murray did not press the issue with him. Instead, he sat next to him and stared off down the streets.
"What did you see?"
Sans wiped some blood from his face and pressed his eyes with his fingers.
"There's so many of them. Of those things."
He could not find the words to describe the horrible sight of the hundreds of victims strung to the walls in the tunnels, he could not go into details about the attack, the swarm, the death and destruction he just witnessed. There simply were not words for it.
He hung his head low and he whispered after a long pause.
"We're not going to win this, Murray."