Page 59 of Ascendent
Corpses. A pile of corpses over three meters tall, helter-skelter arms and legs strewn on top of each other, in every direction. Flight suits, overalls, fatigues. A hundred corpses or more, piled haphazardly in the darkness. Blood stained the concrete, a giant pool beneath the mountain of death. It still shone, dark and sticky.
Sergey spied anthrax lesions on some of the bodies. Black scabs spreading across arms and faces. On others, he saw the dark lumps of plague, the buboes erupting from the neck.
And hemorrhage. Crimson red eyes, blood streaming from mouths and noses and ears.
His spine shivered. He didn’t want to breathe. Intellectually, he knew his mask was sealed, knew he was protected. But his animal mind rejected what his human mind knew. This was death on a scale he could barely accept, could barely comprehend. A stolen vial from a lab had donethis?
Something moved, behind them.
A slide of a boot. The rustle of fabric. A tool falling to the ground.
Whirling, their flashlights speared the darkness, searching. Shouts, bellows to show themselves, warnings that they were going to shoot.
Sergey scanned the darkness, the underside of a helicopter parked on the opposite side of the hangar. The helo’s engines were open, cannibalized. His flashlight darted over metal, exposed wiring, engine parts hanging from the helo’s open compartments. A face.
He shouted. His flashlight bounced, scanned back. The face, twisted in a grimace, its ruby eyes bleeding from its sunken, gray face, teeth bared, blood oozing from its gums, had vanished.
“Over here!” he hollered. “Over here! It was here!”
Yuri was at his side in a moment, their flashlights searching together. Ilya appeared on his other side, breathing hard. “What the fuck was it?”
“I don’t know.”
A scream, but not a scream they’d ever heard before. Something that sounded like shredded metal, like glass being sawn apart. Like lightning striking blood, like death reaping souls at midnight. Every hair on Sergey’s body stood straight up. The primitive base of his mind shrieked.Run!
The face reappeared, grotesque, wailing.
Running.
The face belonged to a pilot, a man in a blood-stained flight suit. He tore across the hangar, straight for Sergey. He kept screaming, kept shrieking, like he couldn’t stop.
Ilya fired first. Yuri followed, and then Sergey. They shredded the pilot, a dozen rounds each from their rifles hitting his center mass. Blood erupted like a geyser, spraying the hangar for three meters on all sides. His momentum, his run, carried him forward, and he fell face-first, skidding along the slick hangar floor, a bloody trail of guts and bone and skin flaying off in his wake.
His body came to a stop at Sergey’s feet. Blood seeped out, reaching for Sergey’s boots.
Yuri grabbed him, dragged Sergey behind him again.
Ilya pointed his rifle at the back of the pilot’s head and fired, three quick rounds. The pilot’s head popped like a melon. Liquefied brain matter flowed out, black and vile.
He looked up at Sergey. Through the mask, Ilya’s eyes were wide, wider than Sergey had ever seen. The white’s of his eyes gleamed as bright as the Arctic snow. His heavy breathing crackled over the radio. “What the fuck was the GRU doing in that fucking lab, Sergey? What the fuck is this?”
Sergey shook his head. He stared at the pilot’s corpse, at the remnants of his head.
Blond hair stuck out of the matted blood. Blond hair stained with blood.
He walked away, into the circle of the rest of the team, standing guard and watching the shadows in case any more survivors appeared. But was that a survivor? Was he even alive? Was he like the pilots in the forest?
Blond hair. A pilot’s jumpsuit.
It’s not him.
Still. A part of him was wailing, desperate to find Sasha, to hold him, to listen to his voice.
But Sasha was gone. Again.
Closing his eyes, Sergey tried to stop the world spinning around him. Everything was upside down. Everything was sideways, ripped from right to left. He remembered this feeling, this loss, this quiet panic that crawled through his soul.
Freefall.
