Death Cry. James Axler

his Calico M-960 subgun at Kane and growled between gritted teeth, “What’s to stop me offing you right now?”

      The other people in the room looked at the guard a moment, horror on their faces, and a heated argument erupted between the millennialists.

      Kane stood utterly amazed as the various players before him argued about the practicality of shooting a man holding a dead man’s switch. After a few seconds he put two fingers from his empty left hand in his mouth and made a piercing whistle to get everyone’s attention.

      “Look,” he told his audience when they had all turned to him, “we don’t have time to argue about this. Make your decision now—either get out or stay here and get blown up. Don’t complicate the very simple set of options I’m giving you.”

      One of the whitecoats, a bespectacled man with thin blond hair, spoke up. “This is highly unusual. Our section leader would be terribly upset if we were to just leave this operation.”

      Grant took a step forward and grabbed the blond scientist by his collar, ramming the nose of his Sin Eater in the man’s terrified face. “My man here is holding a bomb. We don’t give a crap how upset your boss is going to be.”

      Grant tossed the man aside, and the scientist stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet and crashing into a wall between two of the armed guards.

      The other scientist, a man with a round face and the black hair and gold skin of an Asian, spoke up, addressing his colleagues. “There are only three of them—how much can they take? This isn’t worth getting blown up over.”

      Kane nodded. “Smart man. You all get out of here now, and we won’t shoot you in the back or anything like that—you have my word on that much.”

      Warily, the guards and scientists made their way from the room. Grant followed them, the Sin Eater poised in his hand, and instructed them to continue through the tunnel until they were outside the facility. Grant watched them leave, walking down the corridor with heavy heads and muttering desperately as they left.

      Inside the computer room, Kane was clipping the flask to his belt. “You know,” he said with a laugh when he saw Brigid’s scowl, “I could get used to this diplomacy thing.”

      “You were lucky,” she told him as she stepped toward one of the computer terminals and started tapping at the keyboard. “They’ve got juice going to the computers at least,” she added after a moment.

      Grant reentered and Kane gave him instructions. “I need you to find us that mat-trans,” he told his colleague. “I want to be out of here in ten minutes.”

      “Ten?” Brigid echoed, shock in her voice. “Kane, that’s impossible. I can’t get into this network in ten—”

      “This bluff won’t last long, Baptiste,” Kane explained, and she noted that his humor had abruptly faded. “Ten minutes is the absolute maximum we have here, you understand?”

      She nodded and went back to work on the keyboard, pulling a pair of small, square-framed spectacles from her inside pocket and propping them on her nose as the screen before her came to life.

      Grant stepped back to the double doors, turning back to address Brigid. “I saw a map on the wall a ways back. Do you remember roughly where this mat-trans is, Brigid?”

      Brigid didn’t look up as scrolling figures rushed across the screen before her. “Not sure,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing one in the part of the map I looked at.”

      Kane nodded toward the corridor. “Get to the map and look for anything that says ‘transport.’ The mat-trans gateway won’t be far.”

      Grant put a finger to his brow in salute before ducking through the door and jogging back down the corridor to the wall map.

      “You realize that this won’t work,” Brigid breathed after a few moments.

      “How’s that?” Kane asked, annoyed.

      “This is a two-hundred-year-old computer running off a generator. Whatever’s inside is encrypted up the wazoo, and I don’t know what it is I’m looking for anyway,” she explained in an even tone.

      Kane sighed. “And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning beforehand?”

      Brigid pierced him with a frosty stare, anger bristling in her tone. “I thought we’d have maybe an afternoon here, do a recce, come back at a later date once we had decided what it was we were looking at. You’re the one who got all gung ho and decided to threaten armed people with a bomb unless you got your own damn way.”

      Kane looked annoyed, his voice defensive. “Hey, it’s called improvisation, Baptiste.”

      O UTSIDE THE COMPUTER ROOM , Grant made his way back along the corridor to the place where he had seen the map. A large color-coded illustration, the map sat behind hard, transparent plastic to one side of a T-junction corridor that disappeared farther into the disused military base.

      Leaning close as the overhead light flickered and hummed, Grant swept grime from the plastic covering with the edge of his free hand before wiping the hand on his pant leg. The map showed five different-colored sections that formed a bulging rectangular shape. The key to the right-hand side of the map gave a broad term for what each section represented, green for research, orange for personnel and so on.

      Grant looked swiftly over the map and located the computer room he had just come from. Then he carefully ran his finger along the key to the side, reading the names of all the different divisions and subdivisions. He was halfway down the list when he heard footsteps off to his right, coming from the same direction as the entry from the mine shaft. He turned to his right, automatically lifting the Sin Eater and pointing it into the darkness of the dusty, ill-lit corridor.

      If I can’t see them then they’re probably having just as much trouble seeing me, Grant realized, holding the pistol steady as he took a step away from the wall and crouched to make a smaller target. At two hundred fifty pounds of solid muscle, it wasn’t easy for the big man to make an appreciably smaller target.

      Grant thought back to the discussion with the millennialist guards outside. They’d said there were eight people down there, and with the two they’d found in the shaft plus the five in the computer room, Grant realized that they were still one man short. “Guy chose the wrong time to take a leak,” Grant murmured as he darted lightly forward along the corridor, his movements quiet and economical.

      As he moved forward, holding the Sin Eater before him with his left hand steadying his grip, Grant spotted movement in the dark. Someone was approaching, walking along the corridor toward him. Grant was suddenly very conscious that, despite the poor lighting, he was still dressed in white jacket and hat for the snow. He sank into a crouch, holding the pistol steady as he dropped out of the stranger’s potential eye line.

      Silhouetted against the flickering light for an instant was a tall, bulky figure reaching for a rifle that was slung from a shoulder strap across his chest. “Who’s there?” the newcomer asked, his voice deep but cracking with fear. “I can see you’re there.”

      A tiny glint of light reflected from the muzzle of the rifle as it swung toward him, and Grant leaped forward, powering himself at the man in a driving rush of coiled muscles. In two steps, Grant was upon the gunman, his arms wide as he gripped the man’s shoulders, toppling the gunman backward onto the hard floor. The long barrel of the gunman’s rifle spit a half-dozen shots as the man’s finger twitched on the trigger, their report loud in the enclosed area of the corridor, but Grant was already inside the firing arc, his heavy body crushing the man beneath it. With a loud crack, the gunman’s head smacked into the floor tiles, splitting one across its center.

      Grant pulled back his right hand, ready to shoot the guard with his pistol, but the man was already unconscious. Breathing heavily through his clenched teeth, Grant watched as a trickle of blood seeped across the cracked tile from the back of the gunman’s head. Grant got up and stepped away from the unconscious gunman, holstering his Sin