The Cerberus Protocol (Hellstalkers Science Fiction Horror Series) Read online

  Five able-bodied soldiers against a horde of demon panther-things and whatever that other thing was.

  Not the best odds.

  For a couple of minutes Memphis held them together. They kept up a steady stream of fire, clumped together in a group just inside of the doorway, forcing their enemy to come for them down a very narrow passageway, but soon they began to run out of ammunition. One by one they were forced to cast their M4s aside and draw their pistols as the creatures kept coming.

  As Memphis was trying to figure out what to do when the pistols ran dry, one of the beasts got close enough to vault over them.

  As it passed overhead, Memphis heard the sound of its tail whistling downward and then blackness descended and he knew no more.

  Chapter Five

  Memphis awoke to a savage pain in this skull and the taste of blood in his mouth. He tried to get up, only to find something heavy lying atop him and it took him a minute to realize that it was one of his men. He slid the corpse off of him and took a look around.

  In the dim light, he could see he was surrounded by the bodies of the rest of his men.

  The fact that he was the sole survivor hit him like a bullet to the chest.

  His first command and his men were all dead.

  You killed them.

  He knew it was true. He’d led them right here, to this place. If he hadn’t, they might have found a way of surviving until help could come.

  It’s all your fault.

  “Shut up,” he mumbled to himself. He’d worry about blame later. First, he had to survive.

  He staggered to his feet, doing his best to remain quiet. He had no idea where those things had gone but one thing was clear; he needed to be gone before they came back.

  He checked several of the weapons lying amidst the dead, looking for something to use to defend himself, but the best he could come up with was a .45 caliber tactical pistol one of the men had been carrying. It packed a bigger punch than the 9mm he had with him, wherever that was now, and so he took it, knowing its owner was beyond caring.

  Now all he had to do was survive until help arrived.

  He knew those in charge wouldn’t worry about the lack of contact from his team at first, believing he would be working on an alternate way of reestablishing communications, even if that meant sending one of his own men back to the surface to re-open the main doors to the complex. After a certain length of time, however, they’d eventually send another team down to see what was going on.

  All he needed to do was hold on until that happened.

  And hopefully warn his rescuers before they themselves ran into those demon creatures.

  He set out, trying to wind his way back through the corridors in the direction of the staircase they’d descended upon arrival, but every hallway looked the same and in the confusion of their retreat he hadn’t stopped to memorize every turn they had made. Within just a few minutes he was completely lost. The exit might have been ten feet away in the next corridor and he wouldn’t have known.

  All the while, he expected to meet up with those panther-things at any moment.

  Rounding the next corner, Memphis was met with a welcome surprise. An M4 modified with a barrel mounted grenade launcher, likely either Chavez’ or Banecheck’s, lay discarded against one wall. He hustled over, picked it up, and checked the magazine, discovering that it was half full. Even better, the gun held a full load of grenades.

  He slapped the magazine back in, feeling a decided sense of relief. At least now he had something worthwhile to fight with. As he turned to go, his gaze fell on a large grill set in the ceiling about halfway down the hall. With an idea forming in his mind, he hurried over and took a look. It appeared to lead to some sort of ventilation shaft. Even better, both the grill and the shaft were wide enough to accommodate him.

  The shaft might provide the way out he’d been looking for.

  He used the barrel of his M4 to push the grill up and out of the way, thankful that it hadn’t been bolted in place. He glanced down the hall to be sure he was still alone, slung his weapon on his back, and then jumped up and grabbed the sides of the opening with both hands. He then pulled himself up into the ventilation shaft and carefully slid the grill back into place behind him.

  He brought his gun back around in front of him and carefully began crawling down the shaft, thinking that if he was quiet, he might have just found his ticket out of this place.

  By using the other grills he came to along the way, Memphis was able to keep track of where he was in relation to where he had started. The M4 he was carrying had a light mounted to one side of the stock and he used that to light his way, making sure not to let it shine down through the grills he passed and give him away. Twice, as he peered out into the halls below him, he saw one of the panther-things go by — it might have even been the same one each time, for it had a facial wound that he thought he recognized each time. Thankfully their senses must not have been to strong for each time he went unnoticed.

  Almost by accident he found himself looking down into the room where they had first been attacked. He could see the bodies of the men who had died in that first attack still lying where they had fallen. Anger swelled at the sight, but he seized control of it before it could get the better of him. There would be time enough for that later; right now he needed to survive.

  Knowing he was close to the staircase, he was about to climb down when he was suddenly overcome by that same sense of overwhelming fear he’d felt earlier. He pulled back his hand and waited.

  The thing he’d glimpsed through the doorway during that last battle stepped into view below him and this time, he got a good look at it.

  It humanoid in appearance and walking upright as it moved about the room, pawing through the bodies of the dead, looking for Lord knew what. It was built like a tank; Memphis estimated it to be about seven feet tall and three feet wide at the shoulders. When it turned in his direction he could see that it had a blunt face, like a lizard’s, with wide round eyes of silver that were constantly in motion. With a face like that one might have expected it to be scaled, but instead its entire body — front, back, arms, legs, even its head — was covered with what looked to be an array of razor sharp horns and spikes; the deadly protuberances jutted out in every direction like a porcupine gone mad.

  Memphis stared at it, a single question rolling around inside his head.

  What the fuck is that thing?

  As if hearing his thoughts the creature stopped what it was doing and suddenly stood upright. It raised its head and moved it about slowly in a circle, as if sniffing the air.

  Memphis’s heart nearly came to a stop when it glanced in the direction of the grill behind which he was hiding and Memphis drew back slightly, not knowing how good the thing’s eyesight might be. Where before the closeness of the ventilation shaft felt safe and comforting, now it was a trap, crushing in on him from all sides as he envisioned being trapped while that thing tore through the flimsy steel in an attempt to get to him.

  Then the thing turned away and Memphis breathed a sigh of relief.

  He watched it paw through the team’s gear, picking up objects, turning them over in its hands (which allowed him to see that it had six fingers, rather than five), and then tossing them aside when something else caught its interest. Memphis wanted nothing more than to unleash a torrent of steel-jacketed rounds into the thing, but the lack of success he’d had with the other creatures earlier stayed his hand. He would only get one chance and he didn’t want to waste it...

  After what felt like forever, the creature tossed aside the ballistic vest it had been looking at and called out in a guttural voice that sounded like someone gargling with spiked balls in their mouth. Memphis nearly fell over in shock when one of the sleeker panther-like creatures bounded into the room in answer to its call and bowed down before it.

  Suddenly the game had changed.

  Memphis had been operating from the premise that the creatures that had attacke
d them earlier were nothing more than strange looking beasts and therefore not an overt threat to a larger party that was properly equipped to deal with them. To discover that not only were the first set of creatures intelligent, but that they were cooperating, perhaps even being ordered about by this larger, alien-looking thing was a much bigger problem.

  Thoughts of simple escape vanished. Right now the creature was vulnerable, if he could even use that word. It was all but alone and a better chance to try to take it out might not come again. If he could eliminate the leader, it might make it easier for the support team to deal with the others, when they arrived.

  He waited a few minutes once the pair had left them room, then climbed down from the ventilation shaft and followed them.

  Ten minutes later, Memphis found himself peering around the corner at the backs of the two creatures. They were standing in front of an iris-like doorway, peering in at the room beyond

  The sign above the door said vacuum chamber.

  Memphis didn’t stop to think, didn’t weigh the pros and cons or worry about how the hell he was going to get out of the situation if his plan didn’t work. He just acted.

  He spun around the corner and cut loose with the M4, chopping the legs out from under the panther-thing with a sudden burst of gunfire. As it crashed to the floor it shrieked in outrage and he responded by putting a grenade right down its throat. It was a one-in-a-million shot and something he knew he’d never be able to duplicate but he was damned thankful for it as the charge went off inside the beast, blowing it to smithereens.

  Alerted by the shots and its companion’s cry, Spike turned to face him, only to be hit in the chest by another shot from the grenade launcher.

  The blast picked the creature up and tossed it back into the room behind it.

  Into the vacuum chamber.

  Apparently this thing was a lot hardier than its pet, however, for it scrambled to its feet almost immediately. As his gaze met its own, Memphis was hit with another wave of crushing fear.

  It was the heart-stopping feeling of being afraid of heights and standing on the edge of the roof forty stories above the street. The gut-wrenching anxiety of the wait for the medical report after the biopsy was performed. The soul-crushing fear of a parent whose child has gone missing. It was all of these things rolled into one and Memphis heard himself screaming in response to it, fighting to keep it from overwhelming him, as his fingers clamped down on the trigger again.

  Another grenade, this time delivered right at the things feet, and suddenly the crushing weight of all that terror was lifted as the alien-demon-whatever-it-was was thrown backward a second time.

  As soon as it was down Memphis threw himself into motion, charging forward toward the door!

  He was only going to get one chance, he knew, and he had to make it good.

  As the creature climbed to its feet and turned to face him, Memphis fired the last of his grenades, hitting it a third and final time. He barely noticed; his attention was on the big green button to the right of the door, the one on the control panel marked activate.

  There were probably a thousand different things the scientists used the vacuum chamber for, but Memphis would have bet in that moment that none of them had ever imagined it being used for this.

  The creature was almost to the door when his hand crashed down on the button.

  There was a high pitched whine as the machinery kicked into gear, the sound of the thing inside the room screaming in rage, and then silence as all the air inside the room was sucked out with negative pressure.

  Memphis lay gasping beside the control panel for a moment, and then raised his head to look through the glass.

  The demon was standing on the other side, staring back at him.

  Memphis didn’t even have a chance to scream. Fear crashed into his mind, so thick and dark and heavy that he simple collapsed beneath its weight, crashing to the floor unconscious.

  Chapter Six

  Memphis came awake slowly, the room sliding into focus as if wrapped in a cloud of fuzzy cotton. He felt drugged and suspected that was exactly the case; the thick bandages around his skull where the creature had slashed him suggested that he was in a hospital somewhere, either at CERN or nearby. He was alone in the room, though there were several monitors and another bed nearby, which seemed to confirm his theory. The pretty nurse who stuck her head in the room and smiled at him a moment later clinched it.

  “I will tell them you are awake,” she said in accented English.

  Memphis was expecting a doctor, so he was surprised when Colonel Warren came into the room a few minutes later. The other man did not look happy.

  “How are you doing, son?”

  Memphis shrugged. “Been better,” he croaked around a dry mouth.

  Warren didn’t say anything to that, just nodded in a distracted way.

  If Memphis’s senses hadn’t been dulled by all the drugs they’d pumped into him, he might have recognized the behavior and been a bit more circumspect in what he said next, but unfortunately they were and he didn’t.

  “Did the secondary team get that son of a bitch?” he asked, as he fumbled to reach a glass on the nightstand that looked like it was filled with ice chips. He could really use some of that right now…

  Warren didn’t do anything to help either, just stood there at the foot of his bed and watched him struggle. Memphis’s opinion of the man didn’t get any higher as a result.

  “Which son of a bitch would that be?” the colonel asked.

  Memphis frowned. “The big tall bastard with all the spikes. The one I sealed in the vacuum chamber.”

  A fleeting expression chased across Warren’s face, there and gone so quickly that Memphis wasn’t even certain he saw it. For just a moment, though, he’d thought the other man was going to shout at him.

  “You’ve been talking a bit in your sleep, did you know that?”

  Memphis shook his head, which brought a slight wave of dizziness with hit and he told himself not to do that again.

  Warren hesitated, as if not sure how much to say, and then settled for, “Some of it’s been pretty far out there. We didn’t know if it was the drugs or the injuries talking, to be frank.”

  A sense of alarm slowly forced its way through the fog in Memphis’s thinking and settled over him like a cold, wet blanket.

  “You sent men into the vacuum chamber, right?”

  Warren didn’t answer the question. In fact, he pointedly ignored it, choosing instead to ask one of his own. “We need to get your statement about what happened down on record as soon as possible. There were some issues with the tactical linkage and we’d like to fill in the gaps right away if you think you’re up to it.”

  Memphis stared at him. “Yeah, uh sure, okay” he said, after a moment. Then, “But you dealt with the thing in the vault, right?”

  “The situation is being dealt with, Captain, I assure you. Rest easy; I’ll send up Major Brighton to take your statement shortly.”

  It was only after Warren left that Memphis realized he hadn’t actually answered the question.

  About half an hour later the major showed up, carrying both a video camera and digital audio recorder. He was accompanied by a lieutenant who served as both a witness and general note-taker throughout the interview.

  “All right, Captain, let’s start at the beginning, shall we?” the major suggested and so that’s what Memphis did.

  *** ***

  One week later.

  Memphis paced nervously back and forth in front of the double doors leading into his conference room, feeling uncomfortable in his dress uniform after being in the field for so long. Not long after delivering his report to Major Brighton, Memphis had received word that he had been placed on medical leave. Given the contents of his report — seven foot demon-like creatures stalking the halls of the complex accompanied by the hounds of hell — he wasn’t surprised. All attempts to get more information about what the relief team found in the vault or ev
en the disposition of the bodies of his men were rebuffed quietly but firmly. Memphis had been ordered to undergo a variety of medical and psychological tests and a panel had been convened to determine whether or not he was fit to return to duty. That panel was due to announce its findings within the hour and he had been summoned to appear before them to hear the verdict. In keeping with the Army’s age-old tradition of making soldiers hurry up and then do nothing but wait, Memphis had been standing outside the room for the last hour and a half, staring at the closed set of double doors and wondering about his fate.

  He was just starting to count the ceiling tiles for the seventeenth time since he’d arrived when a voice called his name from the other end of the hall.

  “Stone!”

  Memphis looked up to see a black man in his early fifties walking down the hall toward him. The newcomer was dressed casually in khaki pants, a button-down dress shirt, and spit-shined shoes.

  If Memphis hadn’t recognized him, the shoes definitely would have given the man away as ex-military, but as it was there was no need for Sherlockian deductions for Stone had served under Major Darius Trent in Iraq for a few months back in ’06. Trent had been in charge of Firebase Griffen when Memphis had arrived in-country the first time and Memphis remembered him as a fair but strict commanding officer. He was a go-getter, pushing himself to the limit and expecting the men serving under him to do the same. The last Memphis had heard the major had left the service behind and had gotten involved with one of the big defense contracting companies.

  They greeted each other warmly as old war comrades often will, but it was immediately clear to Memphis that Trent wasn’t here by accident. He hadn’t seen the man in five years and suddenly Trent just happens to show up outside the conference room where Memphis’s fate was being decided? Not bloody likely.

  Never one to beat around the bush, Memphis asked, “What are you doing here, Major?”