Dark Light: Dawn by Jon Land

Author:Jon Land
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

FORTY-FOUR

Southern Lebanon

The Lebanese soldiers who’d accompanied Vicky and Major Musa inside the facility tensed, the faceplates of their helmets gone misty with condensation. They aimed their assault rifles back across the floor riddled with toppled equipment, toward the door beyond which lay the barricades erected by workers who seemed to have vanished along with everyone else.

“We should get out,” Vicky said, readying her own pistol in her gloved hand.

“My thoughts exactly,” Musa agreed, already backpedaling.

They were almost to the heavy, swinging doors when both crashed open and a surge of motion engulfed them in the same moment the single door leading to where the survivors had made their last stand burst ajar behind an identical wave. Vicky processed the scene in slow motion, catching glimpses of the pathogen’s victims in the next phase of the disease, what Gunther Brune was becoming before he was gunned down.

Her first thought was that their skin had turned inside out, an illusion cast by the fact that the hardened, pulsing ridges layered atop the surface looked like veins and arteries running externally instead of internally. Their eyes were like black marbles wedged into their hairless skulls. The faces of the creatures were dominated by the same crisscrossing, overgrown rows of teeth as Gunther Brune had displayed, looking more like snouts as a result. Their arms and legs appeared vaguely simian, but hairless to reveal those sinewy growths Vicky had already taken for veins and arteries layered outside the skin instead of within it. Encased likely in some form of hardened shell comparable to what she’d witnessed in the patients she’d examined.

No longer human at all, their recombinant DNA reengineered by the infection, turning them into …

Into what exactly?

Musa’s soldiers turned their fire on the creatures, two in each direction to protectively enclose Vicky and the major. But the creatures were on them before the bullets could even slow them down, engulfing the soldiers in twin waves, a blur of time and motion. Amid the horrible screams and red mist wafting into the air, Musa and Vicky bolted for the now cleared path to the door and potential escape. This as the screams of the soldiers being ravaged turned wet and wheezy, and Vicky felt their blood splashing against her.

“What are they?” Musa managed, as they dashed up the stairs, back toward the facility’s aboveground floor.

They shoved their way through a heavy bulkhead-type door. Musa sealed it closed after them, but found no locking mechanism to slide into place. They’d started to rush toward the same doors they’d entered through when the bulkhead door crashed open, the flood of creatures from the sub-level surging toward them.

Musa swung and drained the magazine of his assault rifle, aiming for the head and downing a dozen of the creatures that were immediately trampled by the remainder of the advancing horde. Vicky heard it clack empty, Musa exchanging it for a pistol in the same moment she readied her own. The two of them firing shot after shot, more

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