Chapter 102 – Flush Them Out

  Rodriguez stared at Cole like he’d just walked on water, but the senior engineer managed to stay on task.

  “Colton, right? Tony said you were coming.” He looked over his shoulder to a woman with a phone pressed to her ear. “Tina, tell Tony help just got here. Though,” he glanced out the window at the darkened generator room. “Not sure how much longer here is gonna last.”

  “George, yeah?” asked Cole. The middle-aged engineer nodded and offered his hand. Cole took it. “If you’re on the line with Tony and Doc Sukesh, I’m guessing you guys got some sort of plan working, right?”

  “Yes we do. The trace lab is almost secure, and your buddy is breaking the containment system as we speak. We’re gonna flood this facility with conflicting Lewis Fields, try and make an environment these bastards can’t survive in. Unfortunately, we’re FUBAR down here. Those things trashed two of the generators.”

  “Great, how do we unfuck it?”

  George shook his head. “With gens five and six down, we’re gonna need to use the old LF prototype generator to make up the difference. It’s all remote except for the LF residue supply valve that has to be operated by hand, and that’s locked.” The man dug around in a handful of drawers and finally pulled out a key on a chain. “Also, it’s on the other side of the mezzanine, so… yeah. We got the worst of it down here. I don’t think you can get one of my guys over there.”

  Cole held out his hand for the key. “Probably not. But I can turn a valve. Describe it to me.”

  George handed over the key and walked to one of the workstations. “I’ll do you one better. Look here.”

  On the screen, a security feed was pointed at a set of pipes connected to a machine Cole didn’t recognize. Dozens of cables ran from the top to a scaffolding in the ceiling, along with several pipes. “That’s the generator?”

  “Yep. Northeast corner of the sublevel.” He pointed a finger out the front window just as a half-dozen barbs smashed into the reinforced glass, penetrating an inch or so through. “Jesus!” shouted George, nearly jumping out of his skin. Outside, a massive, serpentine face drew into the meager light of the control room’s window, angling one silvery eye the size of a dinner plate to look through the glass. Several of the soldiers raised rifles but Rodriguez called for them to hold fire.

  “George, the valve,” Cole reminded the engineer, who was staring in shock at the monster. He clapped his hands in front of George’s face, tearing his attention away from the window.

  “Right! Ok, here,” he said. He pushed his shaking finger against the monitor, “Left side, where the piping comes in. You can’t miss it, it’s the only valve with a padlocked hard stop. Take the lock off, then turn the position from shut to flow, and I’ll take care of the rest. Can you make it over there?”

  Cole put the key around his neck and swapped a fresh magazine into his carbine. “Yeah. I can get past the things over here. Getting back, though… not so much. I’ll just have to keep moving. Tell me this plan is going to work.”

  George looked over at his coworker. “Tina?”

  “Tony says sixty-six, thirty-three.”

  “Two-to-one odds in favor,” offered George.

  Cole grit his teeth and sighed. It would have to be enough. But there was still a matter of getting out. The control room had two doors, and both of them currently had black tentacles trying to poke through the gaps and slapping against the glass windows. He looked up at the ceiling, spotting an access to the roof of the control room. “Rodriguez, give me a hand,” he said.

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  “Yeah, boss, whatever you need,”

  Cole thrust his chin up at the trap door and the squad leader immediately got his meaning. He whistled, and two of his soldiers who were too stupid to be in shock like sensible people came over and moved a desk underneath the hatch. Cole hopped up on the desk and reached above to unlatch the access. “Re-lock this behind me,” he said. “Don’t need anything getting in here from above.”

  A heavy impact smashed against the front window as the barb-shooting snake tried to force its way through the thick, wired glass. The thing must be immensely strong, if these things really were coming from an RI four or five world. Cole was cleared for risk index two. Maybe three. Still, at least he wasn’t as helpless as during the crossover event in Syria. He never would be again.

  “Gotta be honest with you, jefe, it ain’t the roof I’m worried about,” said Rodriguez.

  Cole slapped him on the shoulder. “Just keep this room secure, man.”

  “Alright, good luck, brother.”

  Cole pushed up the trap door as quietly as he could, scanning around the roof of the control room for any of the creatures. Artian had called them March Demons, but they seemed more like deep-sea abominations birthed from a particularly unfriendly Lewis Field. Was this what Ryan was fighting on the daily?

  With the roof clear, Cole slid his carbine out first and then levered himself up against the weight of the hatch on his back until his legs found purchase. He low-crawled forward, and the two soldiers below held the hatch up to keep it from slamming, slowly lowering it back into place and listening for the click of the latch as Rodriguez sealed it from the inside. Cole pushed himself up to a crouch and slung his rifle before taking a deep breath. He burned another charge of his ability, took two steps forward until his boot hit the edge, and then leapt out across the dark expanse of the generator room. Wind whipped through his hair and his uniform, and he kept the rifle tight against his chest to keep anything from rattling as he sped over the heads (did most of them even have heads?) of the otherworld monsters.

  The place was massive, like the size of a football field underground, broken only by a few support columns looming in the dark and the raised mezzanine around six huge, humming turbine generators. At least, four of them were humming. The two distant ones were so much twisted scrap leaking hissing steam. One of them was split almost in half by one of the dimensional tears. And the other looked as though that giant armored sea snake had tried to see if it was edible.

  Most of the red from his ability concentrated around the half of the room with the control station, where a small sea of outlines milled below with a few who had navigated the stairs to the control room and of course the serpent, whose outline coiled and thrust itself at the glass again. That window wouldn’t hold long. There wasn’t reinforced glass anywhere in the world tough enough to stop a creature like that.

  The floor rushed up at him, and at the last moment, Cole fed his momentum into his carbine. He stopped dead in the air, just a few feet off the ground, and touched down with the barest ripple while all his kinetic energy hummed in the weapon and the magazine.

  Not willing to risk his light drawing attention, he trusted his ears and his nose to help him avoid the otherworld horrors still lurking in the dark. They all had a fetid, decaying smell like old stagnant pond water filled with rotting meat. Though the water still dripping from dimensional tears didn’t smell much better.

  He thought about Doc Sukesh’s hallway metaphor as he moved to the generator. This door opens itself and the locals barge in if you so much as knock. And good luck getting it shut, again. Whatever this world was, it was bad news for Earth. Even an idiot like him could figure out that much. If a bridge between meant foreign Lewis Field spilling across, able to sustain the creatures that came with it, DOR wasn’t going to want to touch it with a ten-mile pole. And he didn’t know that he could blame them.

  The generator was right where George the Engineer said it would be. A misshapen collection of disparate couplings connecting parts that were absolutely never designed to go together. But a light and a status window blinked on the front panel. In the Army, their generators had a startup sequence that was easy to get wrong. Luckily, George would be handling all that remotely from the control room, and Cole’s job was as simple as could be. He fished the chain with the key from around his neck and found the flow control valve. There was barely enough light to see the keyhole, even with his enhanced Acuity, but he got the key lined up and tried to push it in. It didn’t marry up.

  He turned the key around and tried again. It wouldn’t go in the lock. Wrong fit. Wrong key.